After Botched Execution, Tennessee Governor Urged to Spare Christa Pike

Attorneys for Christa Pike are asking Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to replace her death sentence with life in prison after she survived two doses of lethal-injection drugs. A leading death penalty expert described the incident as unprecedented.

Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of a classmate, was taken to a hospital Wednesday night after her execution attempt failed. Her lawyers said Thursday that she remained in critical condition and was receiving “lifesaving medical care.”

“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” attorney Randy Spivey said at a news conference. “But we know she is alive right now.”

Following the botched execution, Lee suspended further efforts to execute Pike, as well as the state’s other execution planned for this year. The governor also ordered an independent review, calling what happened “deeply disturbing.”

Pike’s legal team is now pressing Tennessee officials to commute her capital sentence to life behind bars.

The attorneys filed an emergency request with the Tennessee Supreme Court, seeking an immediate stay of the execution. They said Pike had endured “unnecessary agony” and argued that subjecting her to another execution attempt would violate protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the failed execution “completely unprecedented” and likewise urged Gov. Lee to commute Pike’s sentence.

“Given the experience that Christa Pike went through last night, after a childhood and young adulthood that was full of gender-based violence and abuse, it would be irresponsible for state officials to put her through another attempt at execution,” Maher told News Outlet. “I really hope that, in light of what she’s experienced, the governor will decide to commute her sentence to life in prison and not put her through another torturous experience in the execution chamber.”

Before the execution was scheduled, roughly 25,000 people had signed a petition urging Lee to change Pike’s punishment to life in prison.

An appeals court temporarily blocked the execution early Wednesday, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision several hours later, allowing the state to proceed.

Pike, 50, would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. Her execution also would have marked the 30th in the United States this year, as Florida’s sharp rise in executions since 2025 has helped drive the national total.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed in the United States, accounting for approximately 1% of all executions nationwide.

Pike’s case marked Tennessee’s second failed execution attempt this year. In May, Tony Carruthers—convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994—was not put to death after officials were unable to locate a suitable vein for an IV. Because the drugs were never administered, the execution was called off. Other states have also suspended executions after similar difficulties accessing a vein.

Tennessee changed its lethal-injection protocol in 2024, moving from a three-drug combination to the single drug pentobarbital. About two years earlier, the state abruptly stopped the execution of Oscar Smith, a first-degree murder convict, after acknowledging that officials had not properly verified the lethal-injection drugs. Smith was ultimately executed by lethal injection last year.

There have been other cases in which medical complications or problems finding a vein prevented lethal-injection drugs from being delivered. But until Pike, no one had survived after receiving the drugs themselves.

“This, unfortunately, is not the first time that Tennessee officials have botched an execution,” Maher said. “There is really a quite shameful history in Tennessee of executions going wrong, although Christa Pike’s really stands out. There’s never been someone who has received lethal doses of execution drugs and survived until last night. This is a completely unprecedented event, even in the context of Tennessee’s other botched executions.”

The Death Penalty Information Center has documented 65 botched executions in the United States during the modern era.

Inside the execution chamber, Pike said she was at peace and “ready to be free.”

“This is a happy day,” she said.

But she remained awake, and even complained about a feeling in her arm. Witnesses reported that Pike complained of pain in her arm and remained conscious after the first dose.

An hour after officials first raised the curtains, witnesses said that a second dose of pentobarbital was administered. Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain until the microphone was cut off nearly 30 minutes later.

Pike, who was 18 at the time of the crime, and her then-17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of the fatal stabbing of a classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, as he was a minor and not eligible for the death penalty.

The third defendant, then-18-year-old Shadolla Peterson, who acted as a lookout while her two friends carried out the attack, testified for the state and avoided the death penalty.

Pike did not dispute that she helped kill Slemmer, but supporters argued that her mental illness and allegations of severe sexual abuse when she was young should be considered. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after the killing.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” she previously said. “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”