Christa Pike, 50, is alive and receiving medical care after Tennessee officials failed to execute her despite administering two doses of lethal drugs.
Pike had spent three decades on death row for a killing she committed at age 18, and her execution by lethal injection was scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday at a Tennessee prison. She would have been the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.
An appeals court granted a stay just one hour before the scheduled start time, but the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned that halt and allowed the execution to proceed. The lethal injection finally began hours after its original schedule.
Media witnesses watched from a separate viewing room as officials raised the curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m. Pike was visible strapped to a gurney, and she remained conscious enough to raise her head and speak to prison officials. She asked them whether her arm was supposed to feel the way it did, though what she meant remained unclear.
By 8:26 p.m., witnesses reported that a second dose of pentobarbital had been administered. Pike could still be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53 p.m., at which point officials announced that media witnesses should leave the area.
One of her attorneys said that Pike is now “being provided life-saving measures” at an off-site medical facility. Her legal team has also filed emergency motions in the aftermath of the botched procedure.
Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter defended the agency’s actions in a statement to Knox News. “The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” she 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. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility.”
Governor Bill Lee addressed the failure in a statement, ordering what he called “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” He also announced that no additional executions would be carried out in Tennessee this year.
“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,” Lee said.
The only other execution on Tennessee’s 2025 calendar had been set for December 3, when Gary Wayne Sutton was scheduled to die.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, then 18, and an accomplice lured Slemmer to a secluded spot, where Pike beat her with a asphalt chunk and a box cutter, then carved a pentagram into her chest. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir, which investigators later found in her possession. The crime’s brutality and Pike’s youth at the time of the killing had made her case a focal point in debates over capital punishment for offenders who commit crimes as teenagers.