Tennessee execution fails: Woman survives two lethal injections, raising protocol questions

On a Wednesday evening in Nashville, Christa Pike was strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, scheduled to become the first woman Tennessee had attempted to execute in more than two hundred years. She was fifty years old. The state's lethal injection protocol called for pentobarbital, a powerful sedative, to render her unconscious before the procedure continued. Shortly after 7:30 p.m., officials administered the first dose. Nothing happened as intended.

Journalists positioned outside the execution chamber heard her snoring, gasping, taking heavy breaths. At one point she lifted her head and asked the witnesses whether the pain and burning sensation coursing through her body were normal. Her arm throbbed where the needle had been placed. A second dose of pentobarbital was administered. She remained alive. The curtain to the chamber was drawn and opened again. Clergy members were called in twice. An ambulance eventually arrived at the prison and transported Pike to an off-site medical facility, where she received emergency care.

The state's protocol permits a second dose if the first fails to achieve the intended effect. It does not, however, clearly specify what should happen if both doses fail. Pike's legal team had warned officials months earlier about a specific vulnerability: her veins were small and difficult to access. During a three-day court hearing roughly a month before the scheduled execution, this concern had been examined in detail. After the failed execution, her lawyers alleged that the pentobarbital itself had degraded and that damaged or "blown" veins had prevented proper drug delivery. "We take no pleasure in being right," her legal team said in a statement, "but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy."

The Tennessee Department of Correction defended its actions, stating that officials had followed every step of the state's established, lawful execution protocol. The lethal injection chemical, the agency said, had consistently been effective. Dr. Joel Zivot, a medical expert retained by Pike's legal team from Emory University School of Medicine, offered a different assessment to the BBC. The concentration of pentobarbital in her blood may never have reached the level necessary to stop her breathing and heartbeat, he said. The delay before resuscitation could potentially have caused brain injury. "It's very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury," Zivot stated.

Pike had been sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a nineteen-year-old fellow student at a Knoxville Job Corps vocational center. Pike was eighteen at the time. She and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, who was seventeen, along with a third companion, had lured Slemmer into a wooded area. The attack involved prolonged torture and beating. Prosecutors said Pike and Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest and that Pike took a piece of her skull as a souvenir. Both were convicted of first-degree murder after confessing. Shipp received life plus twenty-five years with the possibility of parole; his parole was denied in October 2025, with his case ineligible for review again until October 2031. Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, had publicly supported Pike's execution.

Pike's lawyers had sought clemency, filing a 226-page petition with Governor Bill Lee that detailed a childhood marked by violence, neglect, and sexual abuse. She had been raped at ages eleven and seventeen. Prison records showed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Her lawyers cited evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy, arguing this may have affected Pike's brain development and impulse control. In 2001, Pike had been convicted of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate. Governor Lee rejected the clemency petition on Monday, two days before the scheduled execution.

After the failed execution, Lee ordered a comprehensive third-party review of what happened and announced that all executions in Tennessee would be halted for the remainder of the year. The remaining scheduled execution that year was postponed. Pike would become the only person in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed while she was a teenager—if the state proceeded. For now, the execution chamber remained empty, and the questions about what went wrong, and what it meant for the future of capital punishment in the state, remained unanswered.