Christa Pike, 50, was supposed to die on September 30, 2026 — the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. Instead, after officials administered two full doses of a lethal drug, she was still breathing. Witnesses said she was alive and audibly snoring. By midnight, Governor Bill Lee had halted every execution remaining in Tennessee this year and ordered a comprehensive third-party review of what went wrong.
Pike was scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. An hour before the scheduled time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit voted 2-1 to halt the execution, ruling that the courts needed to consider whether the childhood sexual abuse Pike suffered had been fully weighed at sentencing. Hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to lift the stay.
Just after 7:30 p.m. Central Time, Pike was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber. Officials injected two syringes of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used in Tennessee's lethal injection protocol. The protocol calls for a second set of syringes "if the inmate is not deceased" after the first set. It says nothing about what to do if the inmate is still alive after the second.
Pike did not lose consciousness. In an emergency motion filed during the execution, her attorneys wrote: "Ms. Pike has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring." Media witnesses said she spoke in full sentences as the drugs were being administered. "My arm feels like it's about to bust. One spot is really throbbing," she said, according to WKRN reporter Tori Gessner.
Her attorneys filed an emergency motion seeking to halt the procedure. Pike was taken by ambulance to a hospital off prison grounds, where her lawyers said she was receiving "life-saving measures." As of Thursday morning, her attorneys said they still had not been told her condition. TMZ reported that her lawyers described her as "critically ill but not in a coma," unconscious and unable to communicate. Dr. Joel Zivot, a medical expert retained by her legal team and a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, told the BBC she likely now has a brain injury "as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation."
Back in August, Pike's attorneys had warned that she had a vein condition that would make lethal injection difficult to administer.
Shortly before midnight, Lee announced the third-party investigation and the halt on remaining 2026 executions. "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 remaining execution this year was that of Gary Wayne Sutton, scheduled for December 3. Sutton was sentenced to death for the 1992 murders of Tommy Griffin and his sister Connie Branam in Blount County. He will not be executed this year.
Notably, Lee had denied Pike's clemency petition on Monday, September 28. Two days later, the execution the state insisted on carrying out failed in full public view.
More than two hours after the failed execution, the Tennessee Department of Correction said it stood by its actions. "The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General's Office," a spokesperson said. "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."
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called what Pike experienced "singular and unparalleled" — an unprecedented failure in the history of lethal injection.
Pike, born in West Virginia in 1976, murdered her classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, on January 12, 1995, at the Job Corps campus in Knoxville. She was 18. Along with her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and their friend Shadolla Peterson, Pike lured Slemmer into a wooded area of the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus, where Slemmer was tortured and killed. Pike was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1996 and was the only one of the three sentenced to death. She is the only woman on Tennessee's death row, where she has been held in Nashville since her conviction. In 2001 she tried to strangle another incarcerated woman, Patricia Jones, with a shoestring; she was convicted of attempted murder in 2004.
Pike has acknowledged her role in Slemmer's killing, but her attorneys have long argued that her age at the time, her severe mental illness, and a history of childhood sexual abuse make her case unsuitable for the death penalty. Those arguments have been litigated — and rejected — in court after court over three decades.
Pike's execution warrant expired at midnight on September 30. The Tennessee Supreme Court will have to set a new execution date — but with Lee's halt in place and no timetable for the third-party review, no new date is foreseeable.
The deeper question is whether Tennessee's lethal injection protocol survives this episode. If a drug described by the state as "consistently effective" can fail twice at full dose, the review must answer what failed and why — and whether the protocol, and every execution pending under it, remains defensible. Pike survived the state's attempt to kill her, though possibly with a brain injury. Her death sentence remains on the books.