The execution of Tennessee inmate Christa Pike by lethal injection is set to go ahead after the US Supreme Court refused to halt it on the eve of the scheduled date.
Pike, now 50, has been on death row since 1996, when she was convicted and sentenced to death for killing a teenage classmate.
Her lawyers, hoping for a last-minute reprieve, submitted a petition to the high court before her execution, which was set for Wednesday morning.
Yet with the high court having turned down that request, Pike is set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years. Since the 1970s, only 18 women have been put to death in the US, while 1,663 men have been.
On Monday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected Pike’s clemency request, stating he would not step in to stop her planned execution.
Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend at the time beat, tortured, and killed Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
The murder of Slemmer caused a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995, after the teen was discovered with a pentagram—a symbol tied to satanic groups—carved into her chest. Pike has denied that she carved the pentagram herself.
She had claimed Slemmer insulted her and tried to steal her boyfriend. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder both before and after it and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull.
Her attorneys have contended that “an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain” and that Pike was too young at the time of the murder to receive a death sentence for it.
According to the Tennessee Department of Corrections, Pike was the youngest person on death row when she was incarcerated.
She is scheduled to be executed at 11:00 EDT (15:00 GMT) on Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
