Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called off the state’s final scheduled execution for 2026 and ordered an independent review after Christa Pike survived two lethal injection attempts.
Pike, 50, remained conscious and was heard “snoring” after receiving two doses of pentobarbital Wednesday evening at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, her attorneys wrote. “Ms. Pike has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring,” her legal team said in a statement. She was then transported to a nearby hospital where she was “being provided life-saving measures,” according to the same filing.
Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine retained by Pike’s attorneys as a medical expert, said that the failed procedure likely caused lasting damage. “It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” he said.
The chaotic evening began just before 7:30 p.m. CDT, after the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned a stay of execution issued only hours earlier. Witnesses recalled Pike speaking in full sentences as she lay on the gurney. “My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” WKRN reporter Tori Gessner heard her say.
The outlet reporter Kim Chandler heard Pike address her final words to those gathered. “She said she had love for the people who were out here hating on her,” Chandler said. “She closed her statement with saying, ‘I’m at peace. I’m ready to be free.’ Then something about celebrating her freedom, and then she closed with, ‘This is a happy day.'”
Pike had written to NBC News before learning her final appeals had failed. “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” she wrote. “I am not afraid to die,” she added. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
About an hour after the first injection, a second dose was administered around 8:30 p.m. Witnesses were asked to leave roughly 20 minutes later, with Pike still audibly breathing. Emergency vehicles arrived at the prison as media members were ushered out, with no confirmation of whether Pike was dead or alive. No officials from the Tennessee Department of Correction appeared at the customary post-execution news conference. One media witness observed that “nothing about today was normal,” The Tennessean reported.
Pike’s legal team filed an emergency motion to the Supreme Court seeking another stay, arguing she was in “unnecessary agony” and had been denied her right to execution without “cruel and unusual punishment.” “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” her attorneys said in a statement. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction defended 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,” department spokesperson Dorinda Carter said by email. “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.”
State protocol allows for a backup set of lethal drugs if the first proves ineffective, following a five-minute waiting period with the death chamber blinds closed. The procedure does not specify what happens if the second dose also fails.
Gov. Lee issued his statement late Wednesday. “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. “Therefore, the remaining scheduled execution will not be carried out this year.”
The day’s legal drama had begun with a last-minute stay from the Court of Appeals, ordered shortly before Pike’s originally scheduled 10 a.m. CDT execution time. The court acted on Pike’s claims that childhood sexual abuse and rape were not properly considered at sentencing. The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing the delay traumatized victim Colleen Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics.” The high court’s 6-3 evening ruling cleared the way for the execution to proceed, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Sotomayor wrote that the ruling allowed execution “before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered” and that she saw “no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”
Pike was sentenced to death for the January 1995 murder of Slemmer, 19, her Jobs Corps classmate, whom she lured to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus with boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, and friend Shadolla Peterson, 18. Peterson served as lookout while Pike and Shipp tortured Slemmer for at least 30 minutes, carving a pentagram into her chest with a box cutter, beating her with a meat cleaver, slashing her throat, and finally bashing her head with asphalt. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was trying to steal Shipp. Shipp received life in prison as a juvenile; Peterson got probation for testifying against the pair.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, had traveled from Florida for the execution. “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen,” she said Tuesday. “Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51.”
Pike’s time on death row included a 2001 conviction for attempting to strangle a fellow inmate with a shoestring, adding 25 years to her sentence, and a foiled 2012 escape plot involving a corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer. She had recently expressed “kinship” with accused child murderer Lindsay Clancy, telling the Times of London that “we are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.”
The last woman executed in Tennessee was Martin Eve, hanged in 1820 for accessory to murder.