Christa Pike remained alive on Thursday, a day after surviving a failed attempt to execute her for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, one of her lawyers said, according to the Associated Press.
Lawyer Randy Spivey said Pike was being treated at a hospital and that her legal team did not know her condition. “Christa is alive right now,” he said at a news conference. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment.”
Tennessee officials attempted to execute Pike by lethal injection on Wednesday using pentobarbital. Her lawyers said officials administered an initial dose and a backup dose, but Pike remained alive and could be heard snoring more than an hour after the process began. She was later taken by ambulance to a hospital.
Spivey described the failed execution as “torture” and called for Pike’s death sentence to be commuted. Her lawyers filed emergency motions seeking to halt the execution, arguing that she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the procedure violated her protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Governor Bill Lee indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and Tennessee’s only other execution scheduled for this year. He ordered a review, calling the incident “deeply disturbing”, while saying it appeared prison staff had followed procedure. The Tennessee Department of Correction said it had followed the state’s lawful, established execution protocol.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for helping kill 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer when Pike was 18. Pike’s boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison and was denied parole last year.
Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court had stopped the lethal injection shortly before it was scheduled to begin, but the US Supreme Court later overturned that stay.
The failure renewed debate over Tennessee’s use of single-drug lethal injections. The state switched from a three-drug series to pentobarbital in 2024, more than two years after it halted the execution of Oscar Smith after acknowledging that its lethal-injection drugs had not been properly tested.
Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, described Pike’s survival after receiving the execution drugs as “singular and unparalleled”.
