Tennessee Supreme Court denies stay for death row inmate Christa Pike

As Tennessee prepares for a Sept. 30 execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court has denied death row inmate Christa Gail Pike’s request to stop it.

Victims and police response

The state has agreed to several accommodations, including having female correctional officers transport Pike to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and trying to use only female staff to observe her.

A privacy screen will be available while she showers or uses the restroom, and she will be allowed contact with a spiritual adviser in the 12 hours before the execution.

The adviser may also be in the execution chamber.

Pike, 50, is Tennessee’s only woman on death row.

Stabbing investigation

The court rejected Pike’s challenge to the state’s lethal-injection protocol, finding that her thrombocytosis diagnosis, a condition involving elevated blood platelets, did not show the execution would violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment .

Pike had also argued that being watched by male prison officials, restrained on a gurney, or having an IV placed near her chest or groin could cause psychological harm because of childhood sexual assaults and her diagnoses of PTSD and bipolar disorder.

Pike’s lawyers said they will seek relief from the US Supreme Court while continuing to ask Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison without parole.