The US Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Tennessee may proceed with the execution of Christa Gail Pike, overturning a last-minute stay issued by an appeals court hours earlier.
Pike, 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the morning for the 1995 stabbing and beating of a classmate. Witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay.
That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the ruling, with Ms Sotomayor writing that it clears the way for the execution to happen “before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered”.
A Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson said after the high court’s decision became known that the execution would proceed on Wednesday night.
Pike, who was 18 at the time, and her boyfriend were convicted of the stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville.
The case garnered widespread attention back then in part because a pentagram that was carved on Ms Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
The state’s execution order expires at midnight, according to Kelley Henry, a Nashville-based attorney experienced with Tennessee death penalty law. If time runs out, the state Supreme Court would need to set a new date.
After the stay was issued, Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed to the US Supreme Court. Witnesses and media remained at the prison while the high court considered the case.
The attorney general’s office wrote in the appeal that halting the execution at the last moment traumatised Ms Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s lawyers.
Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler.
“It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her lawyers wrote in a filing.
As the execution date drew near, Pike’s case renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders.
Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated.
After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Ms Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she could not “put the brakes on”.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. 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,” Pike said in a statement.
