The Supreme Court cleared the path for Tennessee to execute Christa Pike for a 1995 torture murder, the state's first execution of a woman in 200 years.

The Hill reported that the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to stop the scheduled lethal injection of Tennessee death-row inmate Christa Pike, convicted in the 1995 killing of teenage classmate Colleen Slemmer.

Pike, now 50 and the lone woman on the state's death row, was set for execution at 10 a.m. local time Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Gov. Bill Lee had already refused clemency earlier in the week. The high court gave no explanation for the denial, which landed less than a day before the deadline.

For Slemmer's family, the ruling closed a three-decade wait for final judgment after a crime prosecutors described as a lure, a beating, and a prolonged killing at an abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.

A 1995 murder left a mother waiting decades for final judgment

Pike and Slemmer were fellow workers at a Jobs Corps Center. Both were 19. Court documents show Pike claimed Slemmer had been “trying to get [her] boyfriend.” Prosecutors said Pike and that then-boyfriend lured Slemmer to the steam plant, where she was beaten, tortured, and killed.

Pike confessed. She admitted slashing Slemmer's throat several times, throwing asphalt at her head, and keeping a piece of her skull as a souvenir. Authorities also found a pentagram carved into Slemmer's chest. Pike has denied carving it herself.

In 1996 she was convicted of first-degree murder. At 21 she became the youngest person locked on Tennessee's death row. The Tennessee Department of Correction later recorded another first-degree murder conviction tied to an August 2001 assault on fellow inmate Patricia Jones.

May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, told local affiliate WKRN she wanted the sentence carried out. “Maybe now finally we have the justice,” she said. She added: “It may not bring my daughter back, but it might save another person from getting killed because she will do it again.”

Readers who follow last-minute capital litigation have seen similar end-stage fights, including when Alabama moved to execute Jeffery Lee after separate Supreme Court action on method.

Defenders cast Pike as broken; the record shows a second murder count

Federal public defenders pressed childhood “extreme sexual abuse,” including rape, and said that mitigating history was not fully put before the jury at sentencing. Pike has since been diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder, the reporting states. Her petition called her a “mentally ill 18-year-old kid” at the time of the crime and said she had “changed significantly” in prison.

In her state clemency petition, Pike wrote: “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done.”

She continued: “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

Her Supreme Court filing also argued that the lethal-injection protocol, paired with her medical conditions, would cause “extreme psychological torture when extracted from her cell and strapped to the execution gurney,” which she cast as a constitutional violation. The Court was not persuaded.

Death-penalty cases often turn on late process claims long after a jury's verdict, a pattern also visible when Harris County dropped a death-penalty bid in a separate extradition fight.

Special-treatment demands met a hard no from the victim's mother

Breitbart reported that Pike's team sought an all-women lethal-injection crew, citing PTSD tied to abuse by males, or hanging as an alternative, while also pleading for clemency. Attorneys wrote, “Christa was broken, not evil.” The same account set the execution date as September 30 and noted she was the first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in 200 years.

Martinez rejected the special-treatment ask. “I don't think she should be allowed to have any special treatment,” she told the Daily Mail, adding that Pike “didn't consider how my daughter felt, she's just playing the system... It's all bulls***.”

Gov. Lee's refusal to grant clemency left the Supreme Court as the final backstop. The justices declined to intervene. Parallel emergency appeals at the high court have ended the same way in other high-stakes disputes, including when the Supreme Court rejected surrogate McKenna West's last-ditch bid to block a California custody order.

Tennessee's justice system held the line after 30 years

Pike's case ran from a 1995 killing to a 1996 murder conviction, a second first-degree murder count in 2001, a governor's clemency denial, and a Supreme Court refusal on the eve of the warrant. The method set by the state was lethal injection at Riverbend in Nashville.

Slemmer was 19, from Knoxville. She never came home. Her mother waited through every appeal and every claim of changed character. The courts and the governor kept the sentence intact.

Late stays and emergency filings are familiar terrain in capital cases and in other frantic Supreme Court races against a clock, as when the Supreme Court refused to block a California custody order in a surrogate mother's fight over the child she carried.

Another related high-court endgame came when the Supreme Court let a California custody order stand, closing that dispute after sustained emergency pressure.

Crime has victims who do not get a reprieve. When a jury convicts, a governor denies mercy, and the Supreme Court stands down, the sentence means what it says.