Christa Pike’s attorneys say the death row inmate remains unconscious and on a ventilator nearly two days after her botched execution.
Pike, 49, is still hospitalized as medical staff work to clear the pentobarbital from her system following two failed lethal injection attempts at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday night, her legal team revealed in a Friday court filing. The convicted murderer became the first person in U.S. History to survive a lethal injection execution.
Her attorneys wrote that hospital personnel were still trying to flush the drugs from her body as of late Thursday. The filing painted a disturbing picture of procedural failures during the execution attempt.
“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” they wrote.
Rather than addressing the IV failure, the execution team administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes, the lawyers claimed. The filing did not specify how long the improperly administered drugs flowed into Pike’s tissue instead of her bloodstream before the team proceeded to the second dose.
The attorneys did not provide additional details about Pike’s current prognosis or whether medical staff have observed any signs of neurological function since she was placed on the ventilator. The court document also did not indicate whether her legal team plans to file further motions based on the circumstances of the failed execution.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, then 18, and an accomplice lured Slemmer to a remote spot, where Pike attacked her with a box cutter and a piece of asphalt before fatally bludgeoning her with a chunk of concrete. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir. She has spent nearly three decades on death row, exhausting numerous appeals.
Tennessee had not carried out an execution since 2020, when it put five inmates to death before a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic. The state resumed capital punishment with Pike’s scheduled execution, which Governor Bill Lee had declined to postpone despite calls for clemency from her attorneys and anti-death penalty advocates.
The botched procedure has drawn renewed scrutiny to Tennessee’s execution protocols and training of its lethal injection teams. State corrections officials have not publicly addressed the specific failures alleged in Pike’s attorneys’ filing or indicated whether they will investigate the incident.
Pike’s attorneys said they will continue monitoring her condition and pursuing legal options on her behalf.