Christa Pike is fighting for her life in a Nashville hospital after surviving two lethal injections during an execution attempt that has jolted Tennessee’s death-penalty system back into the spotlight, her lawyers said.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder committed when she was a teenager.
The failed execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution — the second botched execution this year in Tennessee — underscores the challenges states face in carrying out lethal injections and in identifying workable alternatives for capital punishment.
“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers and a witness to the attempt, told reporters on Thursday afternoon.
Christa Pike pictured on the day she was sentenced to death
“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now.”
Her legal team again urged the state to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison, saying she endured what they described as “chemical torture.”
Tennessee has halted executions for the remainder of the year as it investigates what happened.
Failed executions
Problems during lethal injection most often begin with the initial task of establishing intravenous access. Pike’s case, however, appears to have unfolded differently: officials seemed to succeed in delivering the drugs with two syringes, yet her right arm “turn purple” and her skin blistered at the injection sites, Mr Spivey said.
Media witnesses recount scene of botched execution attempt
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based non-profit, she appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her body.
“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” its director Robin Maher said in a statement.
After the second injection, Pike said her arm hurt and felt like it was “about to explode,” her lawyers said — leading them to believe the drugs may have entered arm tissue rather than the bloodstream.
Pike, who would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries, has a blood condition and had feared lethal injection could go wrong, her lawyers said.
They asked the state to consider other execution methods, including hanging or a firing squad, but those efforts failed.
Governor Bill Lee — who on Monday denied Pike’s clemency request to commute her sentence to life in prison — ordered executions paused through the end of the year and directed a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Mr Lee, a Republican, told reporters. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”
Pike would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries
‘Kind’ with her executioners
Pike’s lawyers also offered fresh details about what they say occurred inside the chamber, including that her request for an all-female execution team appeared to have been granted.
Mr Spivey said that during the roughly hour-long effort to establish IV lines, Pike tried to help by advising executioners where to place the needle for better access to her veins.
“Miss Pike was kind and she was cooperative and she was at peace the whole time,” Mr Spivey said. “She was ready.”
Even after the first dose was injected, she continued speaking with her spiritual adviser and the execution team, offering them “loving kindness,” Mr Spivey said.
Because European law bars pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs intended for executions, US prison systems often turn to small, lightly regulated compounding pharmacies through purchasing processes largely hidden from public view.
Tennessee adopted a single-drug lethal injection protocol in 2024 using pentobarbital, a potent barbiturate. It remained unclear where the state obtained the drugs used Wednesday, and Pike’s lawyers said that information was not provided to them.
With most countries worldwide and 23 US states having ended capital punishment, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Pike’s case illustrated why the rest of the United States should do the same.
“The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel,” Mr Turk said in a statement.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational centre, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.
