Christa Pike’s lawyers say the Tennessee death row inmate survived two botched lethal injection attempts and remains in critical condition.
Pike, 49, spent more than an hour strapped to the execution gurney Wednesday night at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville as medical personnel struggled to establish IV access, her attorney Randy Spivey told reporters at a Thursday press conference. At least seven needles were used during the procedure, and one emerged from her body bent, Spivey said.
Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee described Pike as actively trying to assist her own executioners during the prolonged ordeal.
“Pike was not just cooperative, but was trying to help instruct the people placing the IV lines,” Ferrell said.
“She over and over again said ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here, I think it will be okay.'”
Ferrell connected the physical trauma of the failed execution to Pike’s history as a survivor of sexual abuse, telling reporters that being pinned down and repeatedly punctured represented her deepest fear.
“That was her biggest fear as the survivor of sexual abuse, that she would be pinned down, prodded, poked, cut,” he said.
Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, whom she beat with a chunk of asphalt and stabbed in a remote area of Knoxville. She was 18 at the time of the killing and has been on death row for nearly three decades, making her the only woman awaiting execution in Tennessee and one of the longest-serving female death row inmates in the United States.
The failed execution marks the second time in recent years that Tennessee has been unable to carry out a lethal injection. Tony Carruthers, 50, survived a botched execution attempt in 2022 when the same doctor who administered Pike’s lethal injection struggled for hours to find suitable veins, eventually leaving Carruthers with extensive bruising and permanent nerve damage.
Pike’s legal team had previously requested that she be executed by hanging rather than lethal injection, citing concerns about exactly the kind of IV difficulties that unfolded Wednesday night. Tennessee law permits death by hanging when lethal injection is deemed impractical, though the state has not employed that method in modern times.
The governor’s office has not announced whether a new execution date will be set for Pike or what protocol changes might follow the second failed procedure in three years.