Christa Pike, Tennessee’s only female death row inmate, survived two doses of pentobarbital during a failed execution attempt Wednesday night. Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent review and postponed the state’s remaining 2026 execution.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A lethal injection in Tennessee ended not in death but in a hospital transport Wednesday night, after the state’s only female death row inmate remained conscious, breathing, and reportedly snoring following two full doses of the execution drug pentobarbital.
Christa Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a killing carried out when Pike was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead, her attorneys said early Thursday that she was alive and receiving treatment at an off-site medical facility, though they did not know her condition.
The Tennessee Department of Correction declined to answer directly whether Pike was alive Wednesday evening, saying only that she had been “transported to an off-site medical facility.” An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison and later leaving.
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| Christa Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed Wednesday for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer but survived two doses of pentobarbital. (Tennessee Department of Correction) |
A Night That Witnesses Called Anything but Normal
According to media witnesses, the curtain to the execution chamber was raised at 7:27 p.m., revealing Pike strapped to a gurney. She delivered what were treated as her last words: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love.”
What followed bore little resemblance to a routine execution. Pike remained conscious after the first dose of pentobarbital. At one point, she raised her head and asked prison officials whether her arm was supposed to feel the way it did. Tori Gessner, a reporter and anchor at WKRN in Nashville who has witnessed five Tennessee executions, said Pike was heard saying, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,” and then asked, “Does this happen like that?”
Gessner also described Pike kicking her feet so frequently that she knocked the sheets off the gurney. By 8:26 p.m., witnesses reported that a second dose of pentobarbital had been administered. The drug is intended to be lethal in a single dose.
Pike continued to be heard snoring behind a closed curtain. The microphone in the chamber was cut off at 8:53 p.m., and media witnesses were escorted out. Attorney John North, an investigative producer at WBIR television in Knoxville, said afterward, “It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go. But we don’t know that. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.”
Gessner was more direct: “Nothing about today was normal, typical, at all, and the court delay was just the tip of the iceberg.”
The state’s execution protocol calls for a second set of drug syringes if the inmate is not deceased after the first set. It does not say what should happen if the person is still alive after the second set. The Department of Correction said in a statement that it “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney general’s office” and that “the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective.”
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The Associated Press that what Pike experienced was “singular and unparalleled.” Seven other people have survived medical problems caused by an execution team’s failure to place an IV line, Maher said, but no one had previously remained alive after actually receiving the lethal drugs.
Last-Minute Legal Fight Reached the Supreme Court
The execution was never guaranteed to proceed. About an hour before the scheduled 10 a.m. start, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a split decision granting a “short” reprieve so it could review claims raised by Pike’s lawyers. At issue was whether Pike could reopen a court proceeding tied to her allegations that she was sexually abused starting in childhood — abuse that the state did not dispute at a special hearing in August.
Tennessee’s attorney general’s office then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, arguing the execution needed to move forward to “avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics.” The high court vacated the lower court’s stay, clearing the way for the process to begin at about 8 p.m. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“I see no reason to shortcircuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision,” Sotomayor wrote.
After it became clear Pike had survived the drugs, her legal team filed an emergency motion late Wednesday with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the state was violating her right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. Additional motions were filed in the Sixth Circuit and a district court. The execution warrant was set to expire at midnight local time.
In a statement to the Tennessean newspaper, Pike’s attorneys said: “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution. We take no pleasure in being right, 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.”
Governor Orders Review, Halts Remaining Execution
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and announced that the state’s remaining scheduled execution will not take place this year.
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the state’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said.
The failure was the second in Tennessee this year. In May, the state abandoned its attempt to execute Tony Carruthers, convicted in three 1994 Memphis killings, after staff could not establish the intravenous access needed to administer the drug. The ACLU, part of Carruthers’ legal team, said witnesses reported more than an hour of attempts to place a line while Carruthers groaned in pain. He received a one-year reprieve.
Tennessee’s recent execution problems predate both cases. In April 2022, Lee called off the execution of Oscar Smith about an hour before it was scheduled to begin after the state discovered its lethal injection drugs had not been properly tested. An independent investigation later found the state had repeatedly failed to follow its own drug-testing protocols between 2018 and 2022. Tennessee revised its protocol and resumed executions in May 2025 using a single lethal drug, pentobarbital.
Victim’s Mother: “It Was a Mess”
Colleen Slemmer’s family had traveled to Nashville expecting to finally witness the execution. Her mother, May Martinez, had waited decades. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she told the Associated Press.
After the attempt failed, Martinez described the night bluntly to NBC News: “It was a mess.” She said Pike never expressed remorse during the proceedings — “Not nothing … about what happened, you know, to Colleen.” She also criticized how officials communicated with the victims’ family, saying they were told nothing before suddenly being asked to leave.
“We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner,” Martinez said. “And he said that it didn’t work … and she’s on her way to the hospital.”
Asked what message she had for the governor and attorney general, Martinez replied: “They f----- up.”
The Crime That Put Pike on Death Row
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1996 for Slemmer’s killing, which took place on the night of Jan. 12, 1995, on the University of Tennessee Agricultural campus in Knoxville. Pike was 18 at the time; she is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
Slemmer, 19, was a Florida native and a fellow resident at the Knoxville Job Corps Center, where Pike also lived. Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, lured Slemmer to the campus under the pretense of smoking marijuana. A fourth Job Corps resident, Shadolla Peterson, 18, went along.
Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer had eyes on Shipp. Once on campus, Pike turned on Slemmer and began assaulting her. Over roughly 30 minutes to an hour, Slemmer was stabbed, cut, beaten, and bludgeoned as she repeatedly tried to run away. She died at the scene. Her body was found the next morning in brush. Investigators said a pentagram had been carved into her chest, and Pike later bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.
Pike admitted to police what she had done a couple of days later, and Shipp also admitted he had helped in the attack. Pike was additionally convicted of attempted first-degree murder after trying to strangle a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, in 2001.
Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997. Because he was 17 at the time of the killing, jurors could not consider the death penalty, and his age helped win sympathy during sentencing. He has been in custody since January 1995. He was denied parole in October 2025 “due to the seriousness of the offense,” and his case is scheduled for review again in October 2031.
Pike has never denied the killing. Her supporters have argued the state should weigh her age at the time, her mental illness, and her allegations of severe sexual abuse. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike has said. In a letter written before she learned Lee had denied clemency, she told NBC News: “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace. I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
How Common Are Failed Executions?
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| Tony Carruthers, whose May 2026 execution was called off after executioners could not find a vein, was the most recent documented failed execution in the U.S. before Pike's. (Tennessee Department of Correction) |
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been 64 well-known botched execution attempts in the United States between 1982 and the first half of 2026. Most of those ended in death despite going wrong; the organization acknowledges the figure is an approximation. Of those 64 cases, the center counts seven execution attempts as outright failures. Before Pike, the most recent documented failure was Carruthers.
The DPIC, which says it does not take a position on the death penalty itself but is critical of problems in how it is applied, cites figures showing that historically about 3% of attempted executions between 1890 and 2010 were flawed. Lethal injection has drawn particular scrutiny, with 7.2% of attempted executions botched, compared with 3.15% across all methods, including electrocution, hanging, and gas.
Experts have pointed to difficulty establishing IV lines, questions about the drugs used, and the ethical role of doctors in executions, since medical ethics codes require physicians to preserve life. Those numbers have been questioned by some, including Michael Conklin, an assistant professor of business law at Texas A&M University–Central Texas. In a 2020 paper, he argued that some cases classified as botched included prisoners who resisted, difficulties inserting the IV, and instances where prison officials opened the curtain too early.
Nationally, executions have been rising. There were 47 in 2025, according to the DPIC, above the recent average of fewer than 30 per year. Those included the lethal injection of South Carolina inmate Marion Bowman, who received twice the intended drug dose, and Tennessee inmate Byron Black, who reportedly showed sustained cardiac activity for nearly two minutes after prison staff pronounced him dead.
As of early Thursday, Tennessee officials had not said whether they would attempt another execution or when. Pike’s warrant expired at midnight, and the state’s remaining execution for the year is now on hold pending the independent review ordered by the governor.