Death penalty experts urge Tennessee governor to commute Pike's sentence after unprecedented botched execution

Christa Pike was supposed to die on a Wednesday night in Tennessee. Instead, she survived two doses of pentobarbital—the drug meant to end her life—and woke up in a hospital bed in critical condition, receiving emergency medical care. Her lawyers and death penalty experts are now urging Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison, calling what happened in the execution chamber an event without precedent in modern American capital punishment.

Pike, 50, had been sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of a classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She was 18 at the time. Her then-17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was convicted alongside her but received a life sentence with the possibility of parole because he was a minor. A third participant, Shadolla Peterson, testified for the state and avoided capital charges. Pike did not contest her role in the killing, though her supporters have pointed to her mental illness—she was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder—and allegations of severe childhood sexual abuse as factors that should have weighed against execution. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," she said years later. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done."

On Wednesday night, as Pike lay on the execution table, she told witnesses she was at peace and ready. "This is a happy day," she said. But the drugs did not work as intended. After the first dose of pentobarbital was administered, Pike remained conscious. Witnesses reported she complained of pain in her arm. An hour passed. Officials then gave her a second dose. Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain nearly 30 minutes later, until the microphone was cut off. She did not die. Instead, she was rushed to a hospital.

On Thursday, her attorney Randy Spivey told reporters that Pike remained in critical condition. "We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment," he said. "But we know she is alive right now." Her lawyers filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to halt any further execution attempt, arguing that subjecting her to another attempt would constitute cruel and unusual punishment—a violation of her constitutional rights.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the event "completely unprecedented." In the modern era since 1976, when the Supreme Court resumed capital punishment, only 18 women have been executed in the United States—roughly 1 percent of all executions. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the 30th person executed in the nation this year. But no one in American execution history had ever received lethal injection drugs and survived. "There's never been someone who has received lethal doses of execution drugs and survived until last night," Maher said. "This is a completely unprecedented event, even in the context of Tennessee's other botched executions."

Tennessee has a troubled recent history with executions. In May of this year, Tony Carruthers was not executed because officials could not locate a suitable vein for the IV line. In 2022, the state halted the execution of Oscar Smith after acknowledging it had failed to properly test its lethal injection drugs; Smith was eventually executed by lethal injection the following year. In 2024, Tennessee switched from a three-drug protocol to pentobarbital alone. The Death Penalty Information Center has documented 65 botched executions across the United States in the modern era.

Governor Lee responded to Pike's survival by halting all further executions scheduled for the year and ordering a third-party review of what occurred. He called the execution "deeply disturbing." Before the scheduled execution, approximately 25,000 people had signed a petition asking Lee to commute Pike's sentence to life in prison. Now, with Pike alive and in critical condition, that request has gained the backing of legal experts and death penalty advocates. Maher told Fox News Digital that given Pike's history of abuse and what she endured in the execution chamber, commutation would be the responsible course. "It would be irresponsible for state officials to put her through another attempt at execution," he said. The decision now rests with the governor.