Tennessee execution botched: Death row inmate Pike hospitalized after two failed lethal injections

Christa Pike was still alive when she should have been dead. On Wednesday night at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the 50-year-old death row inmate received two injections of pentobarbital—the drug meant to end her life. But her heart kept beating. She remained conscious. Her legal team, watching from the witness room, heard her snoring audibly and filed an emergency motion to stop the execution mid-procedure. Within hours, Pike was in a hospital bed, receiving life-saving medical care instead of a death certificate.

Pike had been on death row for three decades, convicted in 1996 of murdering Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old she and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp had beaten, tortured, and killed when Pike was just 18. The crime happened at a job training camp for troubled teens in 1995 and became a media sensation in Knoxville—partly because an inverted pentagram was carved into Slemmer's chest, a detail that fueled speculation about satanic involvement. Pike has always denied carving the symbol herself. In her clemency petition filed before the execution, she acknowledged her guilt but described herself as "a mentally ill 18-year-old kid" who had not fully grasped the gravity of what she had done until years later. She said she had intended to beat Slemmer, not kill her, but was unable to "put the brakes on."

Colleen's mother, May Martinez, had waited nearly 31 years for this moment. She told the Associated Press that she thought about her daughter's suffering constantly—the pain Colleen must have felt, her attempt to escape. A group had helped raise funds for Martinez and her husband to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen," she said. "Holidays are the worst."

But the execution did not go as planned. Pike's legal team had raised concerns about the state's execution protocol for weeks: difficult vein access, the possibility of blown veins, potentially degraded pentobarbital, and the absence of emergency medical procedures if something went wrong. The curtain in the witness room was closed twice during the procedure. Media were asked to leave at some point. After two doses of the drug, Pike's heart was still beating. Her lawyers filed the emergency motion, and a district judge, Clifton L Corker, issued a ruling acknowledging that medical personnel had begun administering care as requested. Pike was transported to an off-site medical facility.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine retained by Pike's legal team as a medical expert, said the inmate likely never achieved a sufficient blood level of pentobarbital to cause the respiratory and cardiovascular failure that execution by lethal injection is supposed to produce. "It's very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury," he said. The state's Department of Correction defended its actions, insisting it had followed every step of its lawful, established protocol and that the lethal injection chemical had "consistently been effective." The department did not explain why Pike survived.

Pike's execution had been stayed multiple times in the preceding days. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by her lawyers arguing that the jury in 1996 had not been allowed to weigh evidence of her documented history of childhood sexual abuse before sentencing her to death. For years, Tennessee had argued in court that Pike was lying about the abuse. But at a recent hearing about her execution method, the state reversed course and said it did not dispute that she had suffered sexual abuse and rape. The governor had denied her clemency request earlier in the week. Pike is the only woman on Tennessee's death row.

The botched execution raises questions about lethal injection protocols across the country at a moment when capital punishment itself is increasingly rare. Since 1976, when the Supreme Court resumed the death penalty, only 18 women have been executed in the United States, compared to 1,663 men—roughly 1 percent of all executions. Pike's case, with its failures in vein access, drug degradation, and the absence of emergency medical response, will likely fuel ongoing debate about whether lethal injection is a reliable method of execution or whether the state should consider alternatives. For now, Pike is alive in a hospital, and the question of what happens next—whether Tennessee will attempt to execute her again, whether courts will intervene, whether she will face charges related to her survival—remains unanswered.