Pike, 50, was convicted of torturing and killing a classmate when she was 18. She had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, and the U.S. Supreme Court had already rejected a bid to stop it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stepped in at the last minute and issued a stay, according to U.S. Media reports.
Before the stay, Pike had asked to be shot by an all-female firing squad instead of receiving lethal injection, according to a report by the New York Post. Her request points to the wider debate over execution methods in states that still carry out the death penalty, as lethal injection drugs grow harder to source and states weigh alternatives like firing squads.
The case now sits in limbo. Pike remains on death row while the appeals court's intervention buys her more time, but it doesn't erase the conviction or guarantee how, or when, her execution eventually proceeds.
A woman asking to face a firing squad rather than a needle says something about how she views her own death, and about a method most Americans assume ended decades ago.