Christa Pike remained alive on Thursday, one day after surviving a failed attempt to execute her for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, according to the Associated Press, citing Pike’s lawyer.
Randy Spivey said Pike was receiving treatment at a hospital, but that her legal team did not know her condition or prognosis.
“Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” Spivey said during a news conference. “But we know she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care.”
Spivey described the failed execution as “torture” and called for Pike’s death sentence to be commuted.
Tennessee officials attempted to execute Pike by lethal injection on Wednesday. Lawyers said in court filings that officials administered two doses of pentobarbital. Neither dose killed her, and she could still be heard snoring more than an hour after the attempt began and nearly 30 minutes after the backup dose was administered.
Pike was later taken by ambulance from the prison to a hospital.
At one point during the procedure, Pike asked prison officials whether her arm was supposed to feel the way it did. It was unclear whether that occurred after the first dose entered her body, because officials do not disclose that information.
Witnesses reported that the execution-chamber curtains were closed after the first dose was administered. They reopened three minutes later. About an hour after officials first raised the curtains, witnesses reported that a second dose had been given. Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain until the chamber’s microphone was cut off almost 30 minutes later.
Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to halt the execution, arguing that she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the procedure violated her right to be executed without cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions with two other courts.
Governor Bill Lee indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and Tennessee’s only other execution scheduled for this year. He ordered a review of what happened, calling the failure “deeply disturbing.”
“There are very few answers this morning. It’s very early,” Lee told reporters on Thursday at an unrelated event, adding that he had received no update on Pike’s condition. “The people of our state deserve to have those questions answered.”
Lee said it appeared prison staff had followed the established procedure. The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
The state announced in 2024 that it was changing from a three-drug lethal-injection process to the use of the single drug pentobarbital. Concerns have been raised about the drug’s potential to cause “unnecessary pain and suffering.”
The execution attempt was the second time this year that Tennessee had been unable to complete an execution. In the other case, officials did not administer the drugs because they could not find a suitable vein for an intravenous line. Last May, officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers after executioners spent more than an hour trying, unsuccessfully, to find a suitable vein for a backup IV line.
Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, described Pike’s experience as “singular and unparalleled” because she survived long enough to be taken to a hospital. Maher said seven other people had survived medical complications caused by an execution team’s failure to access a vein, but that no one had remained alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions.
May Martinez, whose daughter was murdered by Pike and her boyfriend and who travelled to Nashville to witness the execution, told NBC News that “it was a mess.”
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the killing she committed at age 18. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the 30th person executed in the United States this year.
An appeals court stopped the lethal injection about an hour before it was scheduled to begin, but the US Supreme Court overturned that stay hours later.
Pike and her boyfriend were convicted in the fatal stabbing of Slemmer, a classmate. The killing prompted fears of Satan worship because a pentagram had been carved on Slemmer’s body. Pike’s boyfriend was 17 at the time and was therefore not eligible for the death penalty; he received a life sentence and was denied parole last year.
Pike did not dispute that she had helped kill Slemmer. Her supporters argued that her age at the time of the murder, mental illness and allegations of severe sexual abuse should have been considered. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after the killing.
“It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike once said.
Before the execution attempt, Pike was strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber and described herself as at peace. Asked whether she had any last words, she said, “I’m at peace. I’m ready to be free… This is a happy day.”
She remained awake, however, and later complained about the feeling in her arm. Her current medical condition and prognosis remained unknown on Thursday, according to her lawyer.
