The United States Supreme Court has rejected a last-minute appeal by death row inmate Christa Pike, clearing the way for her execution in Tennessee over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike, 50, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 11:00 a.m. EDT (3:00 p.m. GMT) on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
If the execution goes ahead, Pike will become the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected Pike’s clemency request on Monday after reviewing her application to have her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
“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 murder attracted widespread attention in Knoxville after Slemmer was found with a pentagram carved into her chest. Pike has denied carving the symbol herself.
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.
Pike’s lawyers have argued that her age at the time of the offence should have been taken into account during sentencing. They also cited a history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, saying the evidence was not adequately presented to the jury.
Her attorneys described Pike as a different person from the 18-year-old who committed the crime, saying she is now a 50-year-old remorseful prisoner receiving treatment and helping other incarcerated women.
However, the Supreme Court’s rejection of the appeal means the execution can proceed unless another legal intervention is granted.
According to figures cited by the BBC, only 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men.
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