In a move that surprised absolutely no one who's been paying attention to the death penalty's endless legal tango, Tennessee's first execution of a woman in two centuries was halted by a federal appeals court on Wednesday morning, just an hour before the lethal injection was set to begin. Because nothing says 'justice' like a last-minute reprieve.

The state's governor, Bill Lee, and the Tennessee Supreme Court had already given a collective shrug to pleas for clemency in the case of Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder 30 years ago. Pike, now 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 11am ET on Wednesday. But the 2-1 majority on the appeals court decided that, hey, maybe they should actually analyze the arguments before killing someone. "The interests of justice and the finality of Pike's impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties' fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits," the court said, in a sentence that could win an award for 'Most Obvious Statement by a Court.'

Stephen Ferrell, Pike's attorney, welcomed the news: "The court has stayed this recognizing the serious concerns about Christa's scheduled execution." Meanwhile, the office of Jonathan Skrmetti, the state attorney general, issued a statement that basically amounted to: 'We'll keep fighting for the death penalty, because last-minute objections after decades of litigation are just so common.' They're asking the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay. Because why let a little thing like due process get in the way?

The ACLU, which has opposed Pike's execution, chimed in: "Hours before Tennessee was set to execute the first woman in the state in more than 200 years today, a federal court temporarily paused Christa Pike's execution. Tell Governor Lee to respect the court's decision and call off her execution now." The Guardian reached out to Governor Lee's office, presumably to ask if he's ever met a clemency request he didn't reject.

Ahead of the scheduled execution, Lee declined to intervene, saying on Tuesday: "After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike's request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene." In other words: thoughts and prayers, but mostly the lethal injection.

Pike's backstory is as grim as it gets. She was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, in 1995. The case made national headlines because, well, teenagers committing a brutal murder tends to do that. According to prosecutors, Pike was worried Slemmer was trying to steal Shipp away, so they lured Slemmer into a wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee on 12 January 1995. Pike cut Slemmer's stomach and throat with a box cutter before smashing her head with a rock. Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest, and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of Slemmer's skull. Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Pike, meanwhile, has never denied her involvement and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In a statement included in her clemency petition, Pike said: "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."

On Saturday, Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, said she was waiting for Pike's execution. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," Martinez told the Associated Press, adding: "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst." The Associated Press contributed reporting.