Lawyers for Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike asked the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to intervene and stop her execution, slated for 10 a.m. Wednesday at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. SCOTUS is the last available legal avenue her attorneys have to halt her execution.
The Tennessee Supreme Court denied Pike’s motion last week. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Monday he would not halt the execution.
Pike is the only female on Tennessee’s death row. If her execution moves ahead, she will be the first woman executed by the state in more than 200 years.
Advocates pleading for her life have said Pike was raped repeatedly as a child and teen, “beginning before she could walk and continuing until she was 17, a year before the crime in this case.” She now suffers from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In their plea to SCOTUS, Pike’s attorneys said she will experience “flashbacks” of past trauma she suffered as a child. This, they say, could violate her rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Her lawyers asked the court for a stay of execution to review her petition.
The court had not responded as of Tuesday morning.
“She will experience being held down and then being tied down, very similar to how she experienced being pinned and trapped and raped,” her lawyers said in their stay of execution plea to Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “She won’t be able to escape like she couldn’t escape back then.
“That is likely to precipitate her having a flashback where she will lose all sense of current reality … she’ll be transported in her mind back to times when she was being raped, feeling the full emotional and physical force, and sensations of that time.
“In this state, Christa would experience the subjective terror of being actively raped while being physically unable to resist. This is torture, and the state presented no evidence to contradict it.”
The state said it will try to ensure female guards handle Pike as she is transferred to Riverbend Tuesday and monitored while she is there. But her lawyers say that is no guarantee that she won’t experience trauma.
“She will be transferred in shackles to a new cell in a new prison and monitored continually until the moment she is brought, again in shackles, to a room where she has never been and forced onto a narrow board, where different officers will strap her down by the head, arms, and legs, all while a man waits nearby to penetrate her with his needle and inject her with poison, possibly near her groin,” reads the plea. “Under these unique and undisputed circumstances, the risk that Ms. Pike will involuntarily relive her rapes during her execution is extremely high. She will likely believe she is being raped to death.”
Several organizations filed a brief to the court supporting Pike’s challenge. They include The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Legal Momentum, Life Span, The Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence, and others. They argue PTSD is real.
“The fact that the trauma is not occurring in the physical world has given rise to a persistent confusion that when survivors suffer through a flashback, the torment is ‘all in their head’,” reads their brief. “Survivors and their allies have struggled for more than a century to dispel this myth, which dates at least to the mid-19th century, when women who experienced flashbacks were diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ and believed to be malingerers.”
