At midday on Thursday, October 1, Christa Pike was alive in a Nashville hospital, receiving what her lawyers called "lifesaving care." "We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment," attorney Randy Spivey told a news conference. "But we know she is alive right now."
A day earlier, the 50-year-old woman was supposed to die in the death chamber at Tennessee's Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. She had murdered classmate Colleen Slemmer at 18 and was sentenced to death in 1996 — the first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries. The execution team gave her two doses of pentobarbital. She did not die. An ambulance took her away late Wednesday night, and what she left behind is a full-blown national battle over the death penalty.
Republican Gov. Bill Lee called the failed execution a "tragedy" on October 1, saying it was "deeply disturbing" and that "there is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen." He ordered a "comprehensive, third-party review" of the execution process and suspended all remaining executions scheduled for this year — including another one set for later in 2026. Lee conceded that there were "very few answers" so far and that the outside reviewer had not yet been chosen.
The state Department of Correction said its staff "followed every step of the state's lawful, established execution protocol." The protocol calls for a second set of drug syringes "if the inmate is not deceased" after the first. It says nothing about what to do when the inmate is still alive after the second.
Why didn't two doses of a lethal drug kill her? Pike's lawyers said the execution team attempted to insert a needle into her arm at least seven times before establishing a line. Attorney Steve Ferrell suggested that a lifelong blood disorder may have caused the drugs to pool in her arm instead of entering her bloodstream. Spivey also said it was unclear whether she might have suffered brain damage from being deprived of oxygen.
He said he was "haunted" by the more than 90 minutes in the death chamber — Pike talking, singing, and later snoring loudly. Her legal team described the ordeal as "cruel and torturous."
May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, traveled to Nashville to witness the execution. What she saw instead left her devastated. "I didn't get justice for my daughter," she told the Associated Press. "I watched the whole thing. She was awake. She was laughing. She was moving her head, moving her feet. She was trying to sit up. Didn't work the first time they gave her a shot. It didn't work the second time."
Political reactions came fast. U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn — the frontrunner to succeed Lee as governor — posted a statement on Facebook calling on the state to return to the electric chair: "Christa Pike should have been executed long ago... the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly." She also expressed sympathy for the Slemmer family. Democrats, including Blackburn's opponent, public defender Jerri Green, instead called on Tennessee to end executions altogether.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement on X that "the prolonged suffering — physical and mental — arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel." He said Pike's case showed that the United States should follow most of the world in abolishing capital punishment.
The Catholic Mobilizing Network noted that this is the first time in history anyone has survived two doses of lethal injection — and the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, after the state's attempt to execute Tony Carruthers in May also collapsed over IV problems. Executive Director Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy said two botched executions in a matter of months was "beyond alarming," calling it "the epitome of 'cruel and unusual punishment' under the Eighth Amendment."
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called what Pike experienced "singular and unparalleled." What Lee's review will find remains unknown; Pike's death sentence stands, but her execution is postponed indefinitely.
One detail has infuriated her lawyers: as the execution was going disastrously wrong, they called the emergency number the state supreme court had given them — and got voicemail. They could not reach the governor's office or the state supreme court. Pike remains hospitalized, and Tennessee's machinery of death is, for the first time, under everyone's microscope.