Christa Pike is in critical condition after surviving Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers said, prompting the governor to suspend the state’s remaining execution scheduled for 2026.
The 50-year-old was given two doses of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday night, but remained alive and was later taken by ambulance to hospital. Her lawyer Randy Spivey said she was receiving “lifesaving care”, although her legal team had not been told of her prognosis.
“Christa is alive right now,” Mr Spivey told reporters. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment.”
Witnesses said Pike remained conscious during parts of the procedure and complained about a sensation in her arm. After the second dose was administered, she could still be heard snoring from behind the closed curtain of the execution chamber.
Her lawyers described the failed execution as torture and called for her death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.
Tennessee suspends executions after failed lethal injection
Tennessee governor Bill Lee ordered a comprehensive third-party review and said the state’s only other scheduled execution this year would not go ahead.
“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.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said staff had followed “every step” of the state’s lawful execution protocol, which had been approved by the attorney general’s office. The department said Pike had been transported to an off-site medical facility.
The state’s protocol allows a second set of syringes to be administered if a prisoner is not dead after the first dose. It does not specify what should happen if the person remains alive after both doses.
The attempted execution had already been delayed for several hours after a federal appeals court issued a last-minute stay. The US Supreme Court later overturned that order, allowing Tennessee to proceed.
Pike was due to be executed for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a job-training facility in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike lured Slemmer into a wooded area before attacking her with a box cutter and a piece of asphalt.
Pike’s boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to life in prison. Pike was sentenced to death and would have become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The failed attempt was the second time in 2026 that Tennessee had been unable to complete an execution. In May, officials abandoned the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers after they spent more than an hour trying unsuccessfully to establish an intravenous line.
