Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike, 50, was hospitalized Wednesday night after surviving two doses of pentobarbital during her scheduled execution, in what her attorneys and outside experts are calling an unprecedented failure of lethal injection protocol. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered a third-party review and said the state’s one remaining scheduled execution for the year will not proceed.
What Happened at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution
Pike had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a crime she committed at age 18. Had it proceeded as planned, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
An appeals court halted the execution roughly an hour before it was set to begin. The U.S. Supreme Court later overturned that stay, clearing the way for the execution to proceed that evening.
Media witnesses reported that officials raised the curtain to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney. In her final statement, she said: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love.”
According to witnesses, Pike remained conscious after the first dose of pentobarbital and at one point raised her head to ask prison officials whether her arm was supposed to feel a certain way; it’s unclear what she was referring to. A second dose was administered by 8:26 p.m. Witnesses reported hearing Pike snoring behind the closed curtain until the chamber’s microphone was cut off at 8:53 p.m., at which point media witnesses were escorted out.
Pike’s attorneys filed an emergency motion during the execution itself, stating that she had “lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring.” District Judge Clifton L. Corker later issued a ruling noting that “medical personnel have begun to administer medical care as requested in the motion.” Pike was subsequently transported to an off-site medical facility, where one of her attorneys said she was receiving life-saving measures.
What Medical and Legal Experts Are Saying
Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine retained as a medical expert by Pike’s legal team, told the BBC that Pike likely never reached a sufficient blood level of pentobarbital to cause the apnea and cardiovascular failure the execution was intended to produce. “It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” he said.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, described the outcome as “singular and unparalleled.” According to Maher, seven other people have previously survived medical problems caused by execution teams’ failure to access a vein, but no one else has remained alive after the lethal injection drugs themselves were administered.
Pike’s legal team was direct in its assessment: “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution. We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
The State’s Response
Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter defended the department’s conduct: “The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office. The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”
According to the Associated Press, Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes if an inmate is not deceased after the first set, but does not specify a procedure for what happens if the person remains alive after the second set is administered as well.
Governor Lee ordered a comprehensive, third-party review of what occurred and confirmed the state’s remaining scheduled execution for 2026 will not go forward. “Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the state’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.
Wednesday’s events were not the first execution complication in Tennessee this year. In May, the execution of Tony Carruthers was postponed after staff were unable to find a usable vein to administer the lethal drug.
The Case Against Pike
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and killed in 1995 after meeting her at a job training camp for troubled teens. The case drew intense media attention in Knoxville after Slemmer was found with an inverted pentagram carved into her chest; Pike has denied carving the symbol herself. Two other residents of the training camp later testified that Pike bragged about the killing both before and after it occurred.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the murder, was spared the death penalty under state law due to his age and remains in prison. Pike was separately convicted of attempted first-degree murder in 2001 after trying to strangle a fellow inmate.
Pike’s legal challenges to her execution included an argument that the jury that sentenced her in 1996 never had the opportunity to weigh mitigating evidence of her documented history of childhood sexual abuse. Her defense noted that the state had argued for years that she lied about the abuse, but more recently, at a hearing concerning her execution method, the state did not dispute that she had suffered sexual abuse.
In her clemency petition, which Governor Lee denied earlier this week, Pike wrote that she intended to beat Slemmer but not kill her, and said she was unable to stop herself. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” she said. “It took me numerous years to even realise 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.”
The Victim’s Family
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled from Florida with her husband to witness the execution, with help from a group that raised funds for the trip. Speaking to NBC News after Wednesday’s events, she said simply: “It was a mess.” She has said she thinks about her daughter constantly. “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst,” she said.
Broader Context
Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been executed nationwide, compared with 1,663 men — meaning women account for roughly 1% of all US executions. Had Wednesday’s execution succeeded, Pike would have added to that small number as the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.
Tori Gessner, a journalist with WKRN News 2 in Nashville who has witnessed five Tennessee executions, said the event stood apart from anything she’d previously covered: “Nothing about today was normal, typical at all, and the court delay was just the tip of the iceberg.”
What Happens Next
Pike remains hospitalized as of this writing, and the full extent of any lasting medical harm from the botched procedure is not yet known. Tennessee’s third-party review is expected to examine what went wrong and could affect how — or whether — the state proceeds with future executions using its current protocol.
