Christa Pike's failed execution reignites debate over death penalty

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Authorities in Tennessee have offered no explanation as to why the execution of death row inmate Christa Pike failed following the administration of two separate doses of lethal drugs.

It remained uncertain whether the 50-year-old was still alive Thursday.

She was heard snoring loudly inside the execution chamber on Wednesday evening, over an hour after the procedure commenced and roughly 30 minutes after receiving a second dose of pentobarbital.

Pike, who was convicted over a murder committed in 1995, was transferred from prison to a medical facility by ambulance to receive treatment, according to her legal team.

May Martinez, whose daughter was killed by Pike and her boyfriend, had travelled to Nashville to watch the sentence being carried out. Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, she said "it was a mess."

The outcome, characterized as unprecedented by one death penalty expert, prompted Gov. Bill Lee to pause the state’s remaining scheduled execution for the year. He ordered a formal review "to determine exactly what occurred," putting Tennessee's single-drug lethal injection protocol back under scrutiny.

Pike was sentenced to death for a crime committed when she was 18, and was set to become the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.

Although an appeals court granted a stay an hour prior to the scheduled start Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court overturned the decision hours later.

In court filings submitted late on Wednesday, defence attorneys confirmed that officials had administered two doses of pentobarbital during the attempt.

Defending its actions, the Tennessee Department of Correction said that the agency "followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office."

The state's execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Tennessee switched from a three-drug series for lethal injections to the single drug pentobarbital in 2024. That came more than two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged that it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs were tested properly.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.”

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to an execution team's failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year after Florida carried out an execution on Tuesday.

Strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber, Pike described herself as at peace.

“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said in her “last” words.

But she remained awake and at one point raised her head, asking prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. An hour after officials first raised the execution chamber's curtains, witnesses reported that a second dose of pentobarbital was administered.

Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain until the microphone was cut off almost 30 minutes later.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late Wednesday with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and the procedure violated her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions with the Sixth Circuit court and a district court.

It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to complete an execution. In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The killing gained attention because of a pentagram carved on Slemmer’s body, stoking fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike’s boyfriend wasn’t eligible for the death penalty because he was 17 at the time of the killing and received a sentence of life in prison. He was denied parole last year.

Pike did not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argued that the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on.”

“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement.