Execution Cleared

Justice Brett Kavanaugh signed the order vacating the stay, the BBC reported. He gave no explanation. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Her dissent warned that the ruling clears the way for the state to execute Pike before her pending legal challenges can be properly considered, according to the Guardian.

The US Supreme Court cleared the way for Tennessee to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday, overturning a federal appeals court's last-minute stay.

Hours earlier that morning, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had halted the execution, the BBC reported. A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that a delay was needed to determine whether Pike's claims of childhood sexual abuse were fully weighed at her sentencing, the Guardian reported. Tennessee's attorney general then asked the Supreme Court to overrule the stay.

Pike is now 50. She was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, on January 12, 1995, the Guardian reported. Pike cut Slemmer's stomach and throat with a box cutter, then crushed her skull with a rock. A pentagram, carved into her chest by Shipp. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee declined to 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," Lee said, according to the Guardian.

If carried out, the execution would make Pike the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years, the BBC and the Economic Times reported. The BBC reported that it was not immediately clear when the lethal injection would proceed.

In a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual adviser and cited by the Economic Times, Pike wrote that she is at peace. "I am not afraid to die," she wrote. "I'm only nervous about the process."

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, told the Associated Press she thinks of her daughter constantly. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen," she said. "Holidays are the worst."