Five days from now, Tennessee intends to execute Christa Gail Pike at 10:00 a.m. CDT inside Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville, and the state is no longer treating that date as a hypothetical. The Department of Correction has already published final media rules: reporters must have RSVP’d by September 21, check in at 7:30 a.m. on September 30, enter the prison parking lot no later than 8:30, stay inside a marked zone, wear badges issued on site, leave within an hour of the post-execution briefing, and stay off the property for 72 hours after that. Staff who will carry out the sentence may not be interviewed. Only the communications director may speak. Seven official media witnesses have already been drawn by lot. On September 23 the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a 23-page opinion refusing to stop the lethal injection and concluding Pike is unlikely to win her remaining challenges to the single-dose pentobarbital protocol, after a special master found her lawyers had not proved a substantial risk of needless suffering.

Pike, 50, is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She was 18 on January 12, 1995, when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and Shadolla Peterson lured 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer into the woods on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, beat her, slashed her with a box cutter, carved a pentagram into her chest, and crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt. Pike kept a piece of bone. Shipp received life with the possibility of parole. Peterson testified and walked free. Pike received death. Her attorneys have filed a 226-page clemency peтιтion with Governor Bill Lee that does not deny the murder. It asks him to commute the sentence to life without parole because she was a teenager, because she survived childhood rape and physical abuse the state does not dispute, because she has PTSD, bipolar disorder, a blood-clotting condition and veins that make an IV difficult, and because nearly three decades as the only condemned woman left her in prolonged isolation. They also asked for an all-female execution team. The department would not promise one.

United Nations experts and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have urged an immediate halt, warning that moving her into a men’s prison, restraining her, and injecting her—possibly at the hands of male officers—would force a survivor of Sєxual violence to relive the ᴀssaults as she dies. Slemmer’s mother has said she supports the sentence. If Lee stays silent and the U.S. Supreme Court does not intervene, Pike will become the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819 and the first person in the state’s modern death-penalty era put to death for a crime committed at 18. The parking lot opens at dawn on Tuesday whether he speaks or not.