Christa Pike’s case has entered its most urgent stage yet after her attorneys formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Tennessee from carrying out her execution on September 30.

The emergency application was filed on September 25 and submitted to Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Pike’s lawyers are asking the Court to stay the execution while it considers her petition for review and her constitutional challenge to Tennessee’s lethal-injection procedure. The Supreme Court docket also shows an additional supporting filing submitted on September 26. As of the latest publicly available update, no ruling on the stay request has been posted.

The filing came after the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected Pike’s latest request for relief on September 23. That denial left her execution warrant in place and forced her legal team to turn to the nation’s highest court with only days remaining.

Pike is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 10:00 a.m. CDT on September 30, 2026. The Death Penalty Information Center continues to list the Tennessee warrant as active, meaning no stay or commutation has yet formally removed the execution from the calendar.

At the same time, her lawyers are continuing a separate clemency effort before Gov. Bill Lee. Their 226-page petition asks that Pike’s death sentence be reduced to life without parole, emphasizing her age of 18 at the time of the crime, severe childhood sexual abuse, later diagnoses including PTSD and bipolar disorder, and nearly three decades on death row.

Trauma specialists supporting her case have also argued that Tennessee’s execution protocol could trigger severe traumatic flashbacks because it involves restraint, invasive procedures and loss of bodily control. Pike has separately challenged the protocol on constitutional and religious grounds.

Tennessee, meanwhile, is still preparing for the execution. The Department of Correction has selected official media witnesses and issued final reporting instructions for Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, another indication that the state is proceeding unless a court or the governor intervenes.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. If the execution goes forward, she would become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the only person executed in the state’s modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at age 18, 19 or 20.