The execution of Christa Pike has been temporarily halted as Tennessee seeks to put the first woman to death in 200 years.

A United States district court temporarily stayed the execution of Christine Pikethe only woman on Tennessee’s death row, just hours before she received a lethal injection Wednesday.

Although the execution was halted, it could still take place later Wednesday because the state intends to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the district court’s last-minute decision, a lawyer for Pike said. If that happened, Pike would become the only woman executed in the state in the past 200 years.

“I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just nervous about the process,” Pike wrote in a letter she wrote before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee rejected her clemency request Monday, paving the way for her execution.

Thanking those who rallied for the governor to intervene and stop the plan, Pike said she was “at peace” regardless of the outcome of her candidacy. CBS News obtained a copy of the letter from his spiritual advisor, the Rev. Mikey Noechel, as well as a copy of another note Noechel received from Pike that contained handwritten lines from the poem “To ——” by Edgar Allan Poe. Noechel said he received the poem on Sunday and the letter on Monday.

Now 50, Pike has been incarcerated since 1995 for the murder that year of her former classmate, Colleen Slemmer. According to court records, Pike and Slemmer were students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville when Pike, then 18, tortured and killed her, allegedly because of comments Slemmer, 19, made about her relationship.

Pike’s boyfriend and another friend contributed to the attack and killing, records show.

Pike’s case has attracted international attention and some outcry, with the United Nations recently joining local advocacy groups in calling on Lee to commute his death sentence.

Their criticisms focus primarily on childhood abuse and the untreated mental illness Pike suffered from when Slemmer was killed, factors that play a much larger role in how juries make sentencing decisions today than they did during Pike’s trial. U.N. experts also said Pike’s decades spent in solitary confinement on death row, as the only woman awaiting execution in Tennessee, should amount to illegal torture.

Once Lee announced that the clemency request had been denied, Pike’s lawyers released a statement saying they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken” by the news. In it, they noted how much their client had changed during his incarceration.

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

One of her lawyers, Luke Ihnen, told CBS News that “in her classic Christa way, she spent her final days worrying more about her friends, family and legal team than herself.”

In a statement attached to her request for clemency, Pike said she recognized that the ramifications of her crime had been “enormous, unforgettable and ruined countless lives.”

“It took me many years to realize the gravity of what I had done. Even longer to come to terms with how many lives I affected,” she said. “I took the life of someone’s child, their sister, their friend. It makes me sick now to think that I had the capacity to commit such a crime.”

The conviction for murder

Prosecutors and jurors in Pike’s original criminal case, as well as the judges who presided over that trial and its numerous appeals, have often described Slemmer’s killing as brutal and gruesome. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Knoxville News-Sentinel after Pike’s conviction in 1996 that she thought Pike was “evil” and that the state “should kill her immediately.”

Records from Pike’s trial show Slemmer was beaten and repeatedly cut with a meat cleaver and a box cutter for 30 minutes or an hour, in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus.

When her body was found, a piece of the skull was missing and pentagrams had been carved into her forehead and chest, details that fueled a media firestorm and coincided with the “Satanic Panic” that swept the country in the 1980s and ’90s. Her classmates said Pike later bragged about the murder, revealing to one of them that she had removed and kept the missing piece of Slemmer’s skull as a “souvenir.”

Pike’s boyfriend at the time of the murder, Tadaryl Shipp, and her friend, Shadolla Peterson, both helped her commit Slemmer’s murder, according to court records. Because Shipp was 17 at the time, he was not eligible for the death penalty and was instead sentenced to life in prison. His parole was denied last year, but the case will be reviewed again near the end of 2031. Peterson was placed on probation, exclusively, following the murder after testifying against Pike at his trial.

Debate on adolescent sentencing

Although Pike confessed to the crime, her legal team has filed numerous appeals challenging her death sentence and questioning whether she would still receive it if her case went to trial today.

When Pike was sentenced to 20 years in 1996, she was the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States. Now, she would be the only American inmate put to death since the beginning of this era who was 18, 19 or 20 when their crimes were committed, if Wednesday’s execution goes ahead. It would also be the first execution of a woman in Tennessee since at least 1820, according to research on the death penalty in early America.

His lawyers said Pike’s history of sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect as a child, as well as his psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and congenital brain damage, were not adequately represented in his original trial. They also pointed out that if Pike had been a few months younger at the time of the murder, she could not have received the death penalty in Tennessee.

“In sentencing Pike to death, we foreclose the possibility that her crime was the product of the immature mind of her youth rather than constant depravity,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Stranch wrote in a concurring opinion on one of Pike’s unsuccessful appeals in 2018. Although she sided with the majority against her, Stranch acknowledged the controversy surrounding Pike’s death sentence, writing that “we presume she is incapable of reform even as the stories of other teenage killers, many of whom have been rehabilitated behind bars, reveal other possibilities.”

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told CBS News last year that the decline in national support for capital punishment and the low rate of death sentences handed down to teenagers suggest that Pike would have received a different sentence in contemporary times.

“Society’s view of who truly deserves the death penalty has changed in the years since Christa Pike’s conviction,” Maher said. “Her young age, her mental illness and the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the time of her crime would likely convince a jury today that she is not someone who should be sentenced to death.”

Incarceration in solitude

Women are rarely sentenced to death in the United States and represent only 1% of death row inmates nationwide. Of about 2,000 people currently facing execution in the country, only 45 are women, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which publishes data on capital punishment but takes no position on it. Seventeen of these women were sentenced to death in California, which has a moratorium on executions and has not carried out one in more than 20 years.

For most of her time in prison, Pike was not allowed to interact with other people. Among the lawsuits filed by her lawyers, along with their appeals, was one in which they compared her incarceration to solitary confinement because she was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row for all but three of the years she spent behind bars. Another woman, Gaile Owens, was held in the same facility as Pike for those three years before her death sentence was ultimately commuted, but the two never had contact, according to court documents.

Arguing that decades of solitary confinement had violated Pike’s constitutional rights, the lawsuit resulted in a settlement with the state in 2024 that granted her more opportunities to interact with other inmates.

As her execution date approached, Pike was returned to solitary confinement, which Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol requires for 14 days before an execution, her lawyers said in their latest appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That appeal was rejected Tuesday.