Tennessee Set To Execute First Woman In 200 Years Today 

The United States Supreme Court has declined to stop the scheduled execution of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike, paving the way for her lethal injection on Wednesday.

Pike, 50, is set to be executed at 11:00 a.m. EDT (15:00 GMT) at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.

If carried out as scheduled, Pike’s execution would make her the first woman put to death by Tennessee in more than two centuries, BBC reported on Wednesday.

The latest development came after Pike’s attorneys sought an emergency intervention from the US Supreme Court, following Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s decision to deny her request for clemency.

Lee had announced on Monday that he would not commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment after reviewing her petition.

“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 in a statement.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, attacked and killed Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers.

The case attracted significant attention in Knoxville after Slemmer was found dead with a pentagram carved into her chest. Pike has denied personally carving the symbol.

During the trial, Pike reportedly accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to take her boyfriend. Two other residents of the training camp later testified that Pike had boasted about the killing both before and after it occurred. They also said she showed them a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 when the crime occurred, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike’s legal team has argued that her age at the time of the murder should have been taken into account when determining whether she should receive a death sentence.

“With this decision, the State of Tennessee is ignoring what both science and our legal system have decided: an 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain, and 18 is too young to face execution,” her attorneys said in a statement on Monday.

Her lawyers have also pointed to what they described as a childhood marked by sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, arguing that the jury did not hear the full extent of the mitigating evidence before imposing the death penalty.

“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” her attorneys said. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”

According to the Tennessee Department of Corrections, Pike was reportedly the youngest inmate on the state’s death row when she entered prison at the age of 21.

Women remain a small minority among those executed in the United States. Figures cited by the BBC show that 18 women have been executed in the country since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men.

Pike is scheduled to be put to death on Wednesday morning, although further legal action could still halt the execution.