Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike survives botched execution attempt

By Steve Gorman

Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a schoolmate three decades ago, survived Tennessee’s effort to execute her by means of lethal injection late on Wednesday, prison officials said, foiling the state’s first attempt to put a woman to death in two centuries.

Pike was receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived the two attempts to execute her, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.

“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care.”

Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.

“There is no-one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee, a Republican, told reporters. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”

The Tennessee department of correction defended its handling of the high-profile execution, which had been opposed by her lawyers and human rights experts due to Pike’s age at the time of the crime, her history as the victim of childhood sexual abuse and untreated mental illness.

“The Tennessee department of correction followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney-general’s office,” the agency said in a statement.

Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. Prison officials injected two syringes into Pike, her lawyers said in a late-night court filing, causing her “unnecessary agony”.

Most countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Pike’s case showed that the US should follow suit.

“The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent and cruel,” Turk said in a statement.

The failed execution is the second in Tennessee this year, after prison officials in May aborted attempts to execute a man convicted of murders after failing to find a suitable vein for his lethal injection.

The botched attempt on Wednesday came hours after the US Supreme Court lifted an 11th-hour lower-court stay of the execution, clearing the way for Pike, 50, to be put to death for her role in the 1995 torture and beating death of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.

Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, a 17-year-old boyfriend and a third companion, lured Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational centre, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.

The grisly nature of the slaying, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim’s chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir of the carnage, drew intense media coverage at the time.

Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spoken out in support of the execution.

Exceedingly rare

Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring, loud exhales, gasps and complaints from Pike about discomfort in her arm. At times, the curtain was closed, and journalists could only hear sounds.

Clergy were called into the chamber twice, they said, before an ambulance was seen arriving at the prison and then leaving.

Aside from being the first woman the state of Tennessee has tried to execute in more than 200 years, Pike was also poised to become the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.

In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute Pike’s death penalty to a life sentence without the possibility of parole, her lawyers earlier this week documented her history as the childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17. They also cited diagnoses she received in prison for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Moreover, her lawyers pointed to evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for their client to control her impulses as a young person.

Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the correction department.

Executions of female prison inmates are exceedingly rare in the US, with women accounting for just 18 of the 1,683 people put to death since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Before Wednesday, Tennessee had executed 17 people.

Update: October 1 2026

This article has been updated with the latest developments and new comment.

Reuters