Tennessee Woman Survives Lethal Injection State Says Protocol Worked
The State Says the Chemical Worked and She Breathed
Tennessee set out on Wednesday night to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection, and Christa Pike did not die. She is 50 years old and was convicted 30 years ago of murdering a schoolmate. Witnesses reported that she was still breathing despite the injections that were intended to end her life late on Wednesday. Two attempts were made to execute her. The Tennessee Department of Correction then confirmed the outcome of the evening: Pike had survived the state’s effort to execute her. [1] It was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, after prison officials in May aborted attempts to execute Tony Carruthers when they could not find a suitable vein. The Tennessee Department of Correction said the lethal injection chemical in the protocol had consistently been effective and that the protocol did not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out that evening. The protocol is the state’s written procedure: the chemical, the dose and the steps to be followed. She was the first woman Tennessee had scheduled to execute in more than 200 years. This week’s dispute was not about whether Tennessee may execute a convicted murderer. It was about what a state does when the killing does not take. An execution is supposed to end with a death. On Wednesday night it ended with a transfer to an off-site medical facility and an emergency filing. The state has not withdrawn the sentence; the governor has suspended executions for the year and called for a comprehensive, third-party review. Pike’s guilt has not been the issue at any point in the past 30 years, because she has never denied what she did.
Seven journalists were in the room as media witnesses. Afterward they described what they had watched, on a livestream hosted by a local television station. Pike was administered two doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate sedative that slows the nervous system and can stop breathing, the drug named in the protocol. Forty minutes after those doses, the witnesses heard her snore. She was, by their account, clearly alive. Corrections officials then escorted the journalists out of the building. They left while she was still breathing. The investigative journalist John North of WBIR put it plainly: “It appears this did not go how this was supposed to go.” [2] He added: “When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.” A woman under an active court order authorizing her execution fell asleep instead of dying. The two doses did not end her life.
The department said in a statement: “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.” [1] There are no further steps that the department believes it is permitted to take. The protocol, as the department describes it, ends where Wednesday night ended. The department also confirmed that Pike had been transported to an off-site medical facility. [1] She therefore remained at an off-site medical facility, alive, under a warrant the state had already tried twice to carry out.
Pike’s attorneys described the same night in different terms. They told a local news station: “This has turned into agony and a violation of Pike’s right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.” The claim is legal, not moral. It does not argue that Tennessee should spare her. It argues that a state which has decided to kill must do so without cruelty. The attorneys then filed an emergency motion with the US Supreme Court asking to halt and stay the execution. An emergency motion asks a court to act at once, before the ordinary timetable of appeals runs its course. In that filing they said Pike was in “unnecessary agony” and that the state was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. The right they invoke concerns the state’s own conduct. The lawyers have asked the US Supreme Court to halt and stay the execution. Whether the evening counts as a completed execution, a failed attempt or a punishment of a different kind is now a question for judges. The department that wrote the protocol has said the chemical has consistently been effective.
An Afternoon of Reprieve, Then a Reversal
The path to Wednesday night ran through the governor’s office first. Clemency is the executive power to reduce or stop a sentence. A clemency petition asks a governor to reduce or stop a sentence a court imposed. On Monday, Governor Bill Lee denied Pike’s clemency petition. His statement read: “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.” [2] Pike had been scheduled for execution at 10am local time on Wednesday. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Pike’s petition rested on the circumstances of her life rather than on the facts of the killing. Her attorneys called themselves “deeply saddened and heartbroken”. Their statement argued that the state was dismissing decades of research about how much responsibility an 18-year-old — particularly one with severe trauma — should bear for criminal actions. In the same statement: “Throughout her childhood, Christa was failed by people and institutions that should have shown her care and meaningful intervention.” And: “The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists. Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.” Two days after the clemency denial, the case moved to the courts and moved fast. An appeals court halted the lethal injection in a 2-1 ruling just one hour before it was to begin. A stay is a court order that pauses an execution until a question has been examined. The majority’s reason was that the delay was necessary to assess whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered at her sentencing. The vote was 2-1. Tennessee’s attorney general appealed immediately. The appeal called the 11th-hour stay a reward for “abusive delay tactics by Pike’s attorneys”. Hours later, the US Supreme Court sided with Tennessee in an order signed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. With that order, the execution could proceed. The reprieve had lasted only hours. Earlier in the case, the governor and the high court had refused calls for clemency. What remained was not a question of guilt, because Pike has never denied her role in the killing. It was a question of sequence. Would her remaining claims be examined before the state ended her life, or afterward?
Three justices dissented from the order. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the decision “clears the way for the state to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered”. [2] The dissent concerns the timing of the legal challenges. It does not say the sentence should be overturned. It says the challenges should be properly considered first. Those challenges concern whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing. The attorney general wrote that the 11th-hour stay rewarded “abusive delay tactics by Pike’s attorneys. The dissent wrote that the decision “clears the way for the state to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered. The dissent remains part of the court record. As of Wednesday night, Pike was still breathing.
The day after the execution attempt, the governor changed the state’s calendar. Bill Lee issued a statement suspending all executions in Tennessee for the year and calling for a “comprehensive, third-party review” of the latest attempt. The state had already had one failure in May 2026. In May, prison officials aborted the execution of Tony Carruthers, a man convicted of murders, after they could not find a suitable vein for his lethal injection. Two attempted executions, two outcomes that produced no death. In May the obstacle was access to a vein; this week the obstacle was the effect of the drug. Tennessee has had to explain two executions that did not happen this year. Tennessee’s protocol has failed twice in one year, while the department describes its chemical as consistently effective. For the rest of the year, no further execution in the state is set to go forward. The governor called for a comprehensive, third-party review. The scope of the review is not yet specified. The suspension is not a commutation; Pike remains under sentence of death. The department said the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out. The review will examine what Tennessee would do differently the next time a lethal injection does not kill.
Three Teenagers, Three Sentences, One Death Warrant
The killing that put Christa Pike on death row happened on 12 January 1995. Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old. She was a classmate of Pike and Pike’s boyfriend at Knoxville Job Corps. Prosecutors’ account is that Pike, then 18, was worried that Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, away from her. The pair lured Slemmer into a wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Pike cut Slemmer’s stomach and throat with a box cutter, then smashed her head with a rock. Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest. Pike later showed a friend a fragment of Slemmer’s skull. The case received widespread attention because of the brutality of the killing, the ages of the people involved, and because a satanic symbol was carved into the victim’s body. It drew nationwide headlines. That is the murder for which Tennessee set an execution date and administered two doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday night.
Three teenagers were involved in the killing. Only one of them was sentenced to death. Shipp faced the same charge as Pike: first-degree murder. Pike was convicted in 1996 and sentenced to death, making her the youngest woman to be put on death row in modern US history. She was 18 when she committed the crime and 50 when the state came for her. Shipp was convicted in 1997 and given life in prison with the possibility of parole. He received that sentence because of his age. He was denied parole last year. A third teenager admitted to being an accessory and received probation. The gap between those outcomes is central to Pike’s legal argument. A penalty phase is the second stage of a capital trial, in which a jury decides between death and a lesser sentence after guilt has been established. Stephen Ferrell, an assistant federal defender, said Pike’s death sentence is an outlier. He said more is known today about adolescent brain development than when she was sentenced. He said her trial lawyers at the penalty phase did not present the jury with critical information about her past. He said they did not argue that her age should be a consideration. Pike was 18 in January 1995, and Shipp was 17.
Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused starting when she was a toddler. She was raped at 11 and 17, he said. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Amnesty International noted that Pike “endured rape, sexual and physical violence, abuse, and neglect” during childhood. The ACLU and Amnesty International called on the public to reach out to the governor’s office to ask that he take Pike off death row. UN experts called for the execution to be halted. Pike was convicted 30 years ago. Her clemency petition carried her own account: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected.” The petition continued: “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.” On the waiting: “I run through this execution every day in my heart.” She has never denied her involvement in Slemmer’s killing.
Pike’s case is unusual in the arithmetic of American capital punishment. The death penalty is legal in more than two dozen US states, though it is often no longer carried out in practice. Only 2% of those on death row are women. Since 1976, 18 women have been executed in the United States, about 1% of all executions. As of 24 September, 28 offenders had been executed in the US this year. A recent representative survey by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of US adults support the death penalty for people convicted of murder. The same survey found that 59% believe the death penalty does not help to deter people from committing serious crimes. Had the execution gone ahead, Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide dates the last such execution to 1819. Pike is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She is rare twice over: as a woman facing execution, and as a woman whose execution was attempted. May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, said she was waiting for Pike’s execution. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez told the Associated Press.” “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst.” Thirty years after the killing, Tennessee has an execution it intended to complete, a prisoner who survived it, and a written protocol that says nothing about what happens next. Until the governor’s review answers that question, Pike remains in a medical facility, her emergency motion remains with the courts, and May Martinez is still waiting.
Sources
- Tennessee Department of Correction — Quote source (original article)
- Guardian (Original laut Text: Associated Press) — Quote source (original article)