Christa Gail Pike, 50 years old, survived Wednesday after receiving two full doses of pentobarbital in the execution chamber of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
Pike was taken from prison in an ambulance and is in critical condition at an external hospital. The woman had been sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19 years old, committed in 1995 in Knoxville.
Had her death sentence been carried out, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.
A legal drama before the execution
The day was marked by an intense legal battle. One hour before the scheduled start, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals
The Attorney General of Tennessee immediately appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which lifted the suspension hours later.
The three progressive judges of the high court —Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson— dissented.
Sotomayor wrote that the decision clears the way for the execution "before the legal remedies she still has pending against her conviction can be properly examined."
"I am ready to be free. It is a happy day."
Around 7:27 PM on Wednesday, Pike was secured to the stretcher.
Her spiritual advisor sang a song with the phrase "I love you" along with her and stroked her forehead. Before the medication administration began, Pike made her final statement: "I am ready to be free. It's a happy day."
What followed was distressing. Pike complained of pain in his arm and asked the officials if he was supposed to feel that way. At 7:46 PM, the curtain separating the execution chamber from the witness area was closed.
Three minutes later, it opened again: Pike was still alive and making sounds similar to snoring.
The Tennessee protocol includes a second dose of pentobarbital if the inmate does not pass away after the first. That backup dose was administered, but it also had no effect.
For more than an hour, witnesses heard Pike snoring from behind the closed curtain. At 8:53 PM, the evacuation was announced. Fire trucks and ambulances arrived at the venue at 9:14 PM.
Why didn't the drug work?
The most solid hypothesis points to an intravenous access issue. Attorney Randy Spivey counted at least seven needles in Pike's left arm during the attempts to place the line.
Pike herself began to guide the officials: “Please, try here, please, try here. She told them time and again: 'Please, try higher on my shoulder,'” Spivey recalled, in statements collected by the Associated Press.
The lawyer Steve Ferrell explained that Pike suffers from a blood disorder that makes it difficult to insert needles into his veins, and that it is very likely that the pentobarbital leaked into the muscle tissue instead of reaching the bloodstream.
Without a sufficient blood concentration, the drug cannot induce the apnea or cardiovascular failure that leads to death.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, described the event as "unique and unparalleled": seven other individuals had survived issues with intravenous access before receiving the drugs, but no one had remained alive after receiving them.
The crime for which Christa Pike was sentenced to death
Christa Gail Pike was sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a young woman who, like her, was involved in the Job Corps program in Knoxville.
The crime occurred on the night of January 12, 1995. According to the facts recorded by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Pike left the center accompanied by Slemmer, her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and another student, Shadolla Peterson.
The group headed to a secluded area near the agricultural campus of the University of Tennessee, where Slemmer was attacked during an incident that lasted between 30 minutes and an hour.
During the assault, Slemmer was beaten and suffered numerous cuts and injuries. Pike admitted to investigators that he had cut her neck, that he had struck her repeatedly, and that he threw a piece of asphalt at her head when she tried to escape.
The autopsy determined that the young woman died from blunt force trauma to the head. A pentagram was also carved into the victim's chest. After the crime, Pike took a fragment of Slemmer's skull, which was later recovered by investigators.
Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and in March 1996, she was sentenced to death for the homicide, along with a consecutive 25-year sentence for conspiracy.
The state says it followed the protocol, but it does not explain what went wrong
The Tennessee Correctional Department stated in a statement that it followed "every step of the legal and established execution protocol," but offered no explanation of what went wrong.
Tennessee adopted the single-drug protocol —pentobarbital— for its executions in 2024.
The Republican governor Bill Lee described what happened as "deeply disturbing," ordered an external review of the procedure, and indefinitely suspended the only other execution scheduled in Tennessee for this year.
Pike's lawyers requested the commutation of his death sentence, arguing that what he experienced amounted to torture. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also urged Tennessee not to attempt to execute him again.
Meanwhile, May Martinez, mother of Colleen Slemmer, who traveled to Nashville to witness the execution, summarized her pain in an interview with the AP agency: “It was a disaster. I didn’t get justice for my daughter.”
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