Christa Pike’s case has entered its final hours after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said he will not intervene to stop her scheduled September 30 execution, leaving the U.S. Supreme Court as the most important remaining legal avenue.

Pike’s attorneys filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court on September 25, asking the justices to stay her execution while they consider constitutional challenges involving Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol. The application was submitted to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and an amicus brief from trauma and sexual-violence experts followed on September 26. As of the latest official Supreme Court docket, no order granting or denying the stay has been posted.

Gov. Lee’s decision sharply narrows Pike’s remaining options. Her lawyers had filed a 226-page clemency petition asking him to commute her death sentence to life without parole, emphasizing that she was 18 at the time of the crime, her history of severe childhood sexual abuse and neglect, and later diagnoses including PTSD and bipolar disorder.

More than 100 organizations and specialists working in trauma and violence against women have supported the clemency effort. Their argument is not that Pike’s conviction should disappear, but that her documented trauma history and the mechanics of the execution procedure create serious concerns about re-traumatization.

Tennessee is continuing preparations for the execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where Pike is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10:00 a.m. CDT on September 30. The Department of Correction has already selected official media witnesses and issued detailed execution-day access rules.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. If the execution proceeds, she would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

The key new development is now clear: clemency has effectively been taken off the table by Gov. Lee, while the Supreme Court has not yet publicly ruled on Pike’s emergency stay request. That means the next major update could come from the justices at any time before the scheduled execution.