What Happens in the Final 24 Hours Before an Execution?

For weeks, Tennessee had been preparing for a moment that would carry enormous historical and emotional weight.

Christa Pike, now 50, was scheduled to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her case dates back to 1995, when Pike was 18 and was convicted in the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a Knoxville job-training facility.

As the scheduled execution approached, the atmosphere surrounding the case became increasingly intense.

Pike's attorneys had asked for clemency, arguing that her age at the time of the crime, history of severe childhood abuse, mental-health conditions, and other circumstances deserved greater consideration. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee declined to intervene, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an emergency request to stop the execution on Tuesday.

For the victim's family, however, the case has always carried a very different meaning.

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has spoken publicly in support of the sentence, describing decades of grief and the long wait for the legal process to reach its conclusion. That perspective remains an essential part of understanding why the case has generated such strong emotions.

Then, just as the scheduled moment approached, everything changed.

On Wednesday morning, with witnesses already gathered at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, a federal appeals court halted the execution roughly an hour before it was set to begin. The court sought to review whether Pike's claims of severe childhood abuse and sexual violence had been adequately considered during sentencing.