Tennessee's execution of Christa Gail Pike, for a murder she committed at 18, was halted on Wednesday roughly an hour before it was to begin, as a federal appeals court sought to review whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape had been fully considered at her sentencing.

Pike, who is now 50, and her boyfriend were convicted in connection with the 1995 stabbing and beating death of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a job training facility in Knoxville.

Had the sentence been carried out, she would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years.

The 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals halted the execution on a 2-1 vote, after execution witnesses and others had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

At the time of the killing, the case attracted widespread attention, partly because a pentagram carved on Slemmer's body, along with other elements of the crime, heightened fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.

After the stay was granted, Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Witnesses and media stayed at the prison in case the high court allowed the execution to proceed.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the attorney general’s office wrote that halting the execution at the last moment had traumatized Slemmer’s family and rewarded the “abusive delay tactics” of Pike’s attorneys.

Pike's lawyers said that not taking into account what happened to her as she was growing up goes against any idea of fairness in executions.

“It is inconceivable that, in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is set to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the chance to consider those facts when weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” they wrote.

As the scheduled execution loomed, it reignited the controversy surrounding capital punishment for juvenile offenders.

Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue that the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness, and a history of severe sexual abuse, including being raped from the time she was a toddler.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike's death sentence is an outlier, since other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated.

Following the killing, Pike received diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In her clemency petition, she asserted that her intention had been merely to fight Slemmer, yet she killed her in a frenzied attack when she was unable to “put the brakes on.”

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid.

It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done.

Even more to accept how many lives I affected.

I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend.

It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement.

Slemmer’s mother wants the lethal injection to go ahead, saying she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

"Whenever I reflect on it, I envision Colleen enduring that agony and attempting to rise and flee," May Martinez said in a telephone interview on Saturday.

Martinez stated that a group had assisted in raising funds so that she and her husband could journey from Florida to witness the execution.

She did not respond to a message on Wednesday after the execution was halted.

Martinez asserted that her daughter's age ought also to be a determining factor in deciding Pike's fate.

"Not a single day passes, nor a solitary minute, in which I do not think of Colleen.

The holidays are the most unbearable," she said, remarking that her daughter would have celebrated her 51st birthday earlier in September.

The killing shook Knoxville.

Prosecutors said Pike, fearing that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995.

Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt.

Shipp, Pike's boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satan, into her body.

At the time of the crime, Shipp, aged 17, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, while Pike was the sole individual sentenced to death.

According to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years.

However, older records can be unreliable, rendering it difficult to ascertain precise details regarding the last woman put to death there.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, 18 women have been executed in the U.S., accounting for approximately 1% of all executions, according to the center.

Most recently, in 2023, Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin for a 2003 killing, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the U.S.

In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government had put a female inmate to death.

Pike would become the 30th individual executed in the United States this year, following Florida's carrying out of an execution on Tuesday.