A Motion in Place of a Lawsuit

Tennessee intends to execute Christa Gail Pike at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, Central time. She would be the first woman the state has put to death in more than 200 years. Governor Bill Lee said on Monday that he would not intervene: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

That leaves one forum. On Friday her lawyers asked the Supreme Court of the United States for a stay, in an application docketed as 26A414 and submitted to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency matters from the Sixth Circuit. Tennessee answered on Monday morning. Her lawyers replied on Monday afternoon. As of this morning the docket shows no ruling.

Most of the coverage of this case is about her age. Pike was 18 when she and two other teenagers killed Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps centre, on 12 January 1995. Had she been under 18, Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision, would have barred a death sentence. That argument was in her clemency petition, and the governor has now answered it. It is not in the papers before the Supreme Court. Neither her petition, nor her stay application, nor her reply cites Roper at all.

What the Court is being asked instead is narrower, and in one respect more basic. It is whether there is anything in front of it to review.

A rule that starts the case in the last court

The Tennessee Supreme Court set Pike’s execution date on 30 September 2025. Nine weeks later, on 5 December, it amended its own Rule 12(4)(E), the rule that governs stays of execution. The amendment, as quoted in both sides’ filings, says that “[a]fter a date of execution is set, any state court collateral litigation that would potentially affect the method or timing of execution must commence with the filing of a motion in this Court,” and that “[i]f the collateral litigation may involve fact-finding, the moving party must request the appointment of a special master.”

The older part of the rule did not change. The court “will not grant a stay or delay of an execution date pending resolution of collateral litigation in state court unless the prisoner can prove a likelihood of success on the merits.”

Put together, those sentences mean that once a date is set, a challenge to how Tennessee will carry out an execution begins in the state’s highest court, which also set the date, and begins as a request to postpone it. The test for that request is whether the prisoner is likely to win.

What happened to Pike’s challenge

Pike filed her challenge to the lethal injection protocol in the Davidson County Chancery Court on 8 January 2026, eight months before her date. Her claim is that being restrained on a gurney will reproduce, for someone with her history of rape from early childhood and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, the experience of being assaulted, and that this is suffering the Eighth Amendment forbids.

On 6 May the chancery court transferred the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, citing the amended rule. On 12 May the Supreme Court dismissed it, because the rule makes no provision for transfers, “without prejudice to filing a motion that comports with” Rule 12(4)(E). Pike filed that motion on 12 June. The court appointed a special master, who held a hearing from 11 to 13 August and reported on 20 August that she had not proved her case. On 23 September the court agreed, finding that “Ms. Pike is unlikely to succeed on her facial or as-applied challenges to the lethal injection protocol,” and denied a stay.

One detail in that record matters more than the rest. Pike’s June motion did not ask for a stay. The court turned it into one. “Ms. Pike’s motion does not expressly request a stay of her execution,” it wrote, according to the passage quoted in her reply. “But because the motion asks this Court to permanently enjoin state officials from carrying out her execution . . . in the interest of judicial economy we will construe her motion as requesting a stay of execution.”

Tennessee’s answer: nothing final to review

The Supreme Court of the United States can review a state court’s decision only when it is a final judgment, under 28 U.S.C. § 1257(a). Tennessee’s brief builds its first argument on that. The order Pike wants reviewed, it says, is the denial of a stay, a form of interim relief, and not “final as an effective determination of [Pike’s underlying] litigation.” That litigation, the state says, “remains pending on the chancery court docket.”

The state makes a second jurisdictional point as well. Pike asks whether psychological suffering alone can make an execution method unconstitutional. The Tennessee court did not decide that question against her. It assumed, for the sake of argument, that it could, and ruled she had not shown enough of it. A ruling from Washington on the abstract question, the state argues, would change nothing.

On the merits the state leans on Bucklew v. Precythe, the 2019 decision that sets the modern test: “Last-minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.” The special master found that Tennessee had agreed to have female officers move Pike to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution no earlier than 24 hours before the execution, to hold her alone on the unit, and to provide a privacy screen. He also found that “there d[id] not appear to be any scenario by which Dr. Brand believes Ms. Pike would avoid mental suffering, absent no execution at all.”

Her reply: dismissed means dismissed

Pike’s reply, filed on Monday afternoon, opens: “Welcome to the theatre of the absurd.”

Its argument is about sequence. The state, her lawyers say, urged the chancery court to give up the case. The chancery court sent it to the Tennessee Supreme Court. That court dismissed it and told her to refile as a Rule 12 motion. When she did, the court decided to treat it as a stay request. Now the state says that because the order was only a stay denial, the real case is still waiting in the chancery court. “Also missing from the Respondent’s story,” the reply says, “is a citation to anything in the record supporting their contention that Christa’s methods of execution suit remains pending in any trial court in Tennessee. Because there isn’t any.” Then, of the May order: “Dismissed means dismissed.”

The Tennessee Supreme Court has described the rule more modestly. In an earlier order in the case of Tony Carruthers, which it repeated in Pike’s case, it said the amendment “neither created a new procedural avenue” nor granted it original jurisdiction. On that account the rule only decides where a stay request goes; the lawsuit itself belongs in a trial court. On Pike’s account, the rule sent her lawsuit to a court that treated it as a stay request, and a stay request is not the kind of order the Supreme Court can review.

What the Court would have to decide

Stays of execution are granted only where there is a reasonable probability that four justices would vote to hear the case, and a fair prospect that five would reverse. Pike has to clear that bar on a question the Court has never squarely answered, whether mental suffering alone counts under the Eighth Amendment, while Tennessee argues that the Court cannot reach the question at all.

That is where the case stands with a day to go. The governor has ruled on the question of her age. The Supreme Court is being asked about finality, and about a rule of procedure that Tennessee’s highest court wrote for itself nine weeks after it set her date. Whichever way it rules, the case will show whether a state can route the last challenge to an execution through a motion that a federal court may have no power to review.

What this article has not read

The Tennessee Supreme Court’s orders of 12 May and 23 September, and its December order amending Rule 12, could not be retrieved from the state courts’ website, which refused automated requests. Every quotation from them here is taken from the parties’ filings on the Supreme Court docket, which were read in full: Pike’s petition and stay application of 25 September, Tennessee’s brief in opposition and Pike’s reply of 28 September. The governor’s statement is as reported by WVLT in Knoxville. The details of the crime and of the clemency petition are from the petition and from the Death Penalty Information Center.