Tennessee's Governor Bill Lee has denied clemency for death row inmate Christa Pike, allowing her execution by lethal injection to proceed on 30 September. If carried out, Pike would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years, making this a historically significant case in American capital punishment. Her legal team has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court seeking a last-minute reprieve.

Pike was 18 when she and her 17-year-old boyfriend murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a job training camp in 1995; whilst Pike received a death sentence, her boyfriend was given life imprisonment with possibility of parole. Pike's defence argues that executing someone for a crime committed as a teenager violates legal standards regarding adolescent brain development, positioning Tennessee as the first state to execute someone in the modern era whose crime was committed whilst a teenager. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s compared to 1,663 men, highlighting the extreme rarity of female capital punishment. Pike's attorneys emphasise her documented history of childhood sexual abuse and trauma, arguing these factors were unknown to the jury and that she is now a remorseful 50-year-old woman worthy of clemency.