Death row killer Christa Pike's execution cleared to go ahead by Supreme Court Judge

The US Supreme Court has given the green light for Christa Pike's execution to proceed — reversing an eleventh-hour stay that had thrown the case into chaos just hours before.

Pike, who is set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, had been due to die by lethal injection on Wednesday morning. But judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stepped in at the last moment, pausing the execution so they could take more time to weigh her case.

It's unclear how long it'll take for judges to reach a decision

Tennessee's attorney general wasted no time pushing back, immediately asking the Supreme Court to overturn that stay — and it worked. Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the request to lift the pause, though no explanation was given in the order itself.

Pike, 50, has spent nearly three decades on death row since being convicted in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She was just 18 at the time, and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp was also involved in the killing.

Not everyone on the court agreed with the decision. The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — all dissented.

Sotomayor didn't hold back in her objection, writing that the ruling meant Tennessee could execute Pike before her outstanding legal challenges had even been properly considered. "Tennessee's desire to expedite Pike's execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her 'fundamental interest in [her] own life,'" she wrote.

Christa Pike's execution was halted just one hour before it was due to take place (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

It's not just the timing that's raised eyebrows. For years, according to Pike's legal team, Tennessee fought hard in court to discredit her claims of childhood sexual abuse, branding them untrue. Yet at a hearing on her execution method just recently, prosecutors did an about-turn, accepting she had in fact been abused and raped. Her lawyers argue that if earlier federal rulings were shaped by the state's original claim she was lying, the whole case deserves another look — which is why they'd asked for her motion to be sent back to the district court.

It's been a rough week for Pike's legal options more broadly. Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court had already refused to hear a separate appeal, and Tennessee's governor turned down a clemency request too.