Trump Pushes Death Penalty Expansion After Failed Christa Pike Execution - Newsweek

President Donald Trump has pledged to expand capital punishment in the U.S. despite unease among human rights campaigners and death penalty advocates alike following the botched attempted execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike in Tennessee this week.

"We will pass the death penalty for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and anyone who kills a police officer," Trump said in a clip shared by Fox News.

Trump, who spoke at a campaign rally in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday, has moved to broaden out federal executions, but his fresh insistence comes just days after Pike was rushed away from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to hospital, still alive despite receiving two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital.

Pike's lawyers said on Friday she was "critically ill," attached to a ventilator and still unconscious with "swollen, burned, and blistered" arms. Hospital staff were attempting to flush the "caustic" drug from Pike's system, her attorneys said.

Pike, now 50, was convicted of first-degree murder for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, another classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, a facility for troubled teenagers.

Pike, who was 18 at the time, didn't deny killing Slemmer but her lawyers said Pike had suffered a traumatic childhood and extensive sexual abuse, arguing her sentence should be changed to life imprisonment.

The case was widely picked up because a satanic symbol was left on Slemmer's body, and prosecutors said Pike and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp had brutally tortured and killed Slemmer because Pike considered her a rival in her relationship with Shipp. Shipp was handed a life sentence and was 17 at the time of Slemmer's murder.

Pike has spent most of her adult life in prison, and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder of another inmate while incarcerated in 2001.

She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years after multiple appeals and legal challenges failed.

The Supreme Court had denied a request from Pike's lawyers for a reprieve on the eve of her planned execution, while the state's governor, Bill Lee, had said he wouldn't intervene to grant a request for clemency. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a several-hour stay on the day of the execution attempt.

Pike had argued she would likely experience "unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace" from a death by lethal injection, in part because she had "small veins" and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Pike's lawyers said at least seven needles were used in the failed execution attempt, adding in a court filing on Friday that the inmate had "herself offered guidance on where the IV team could attempt access."

"She could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly throughout the procedure," her lawyers said. Witnesses reported hearing Pike snoring before being carted away.

"Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body," her attorneys said.

Lee, the Tennessee governor, said the Tennessee Department of Corrections had appeared to follow protocol during the procedure. But he temporarily stopped all executions in the state for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent investigation into the unsuccessful attempt to execute Pike.

May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, said the failed execution attempt meant she "didn't get justice for my daughter."

Pike's is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year. Lee handed a one-year reprieve to Tony Carruthers in May 2026 after officials in the death chamber couldn't find IV access for the lethal injection, despite attempting to locate a suitable vein for more than hour.

Pike's failed execution "is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center non-profit.

Sandra Babcock, a Cornell scholar who advised Pike's legal team, told The Guardian Wednesday's events were "unimaginably barbaric."

"We should stop the misguided policy of killing people to show that killing is wrong," added death penalty lawyer and founder of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson.

But 52 percent of Americans are still in favor of the death penalty as a punishment for a person convicted of murder, 2025 polling by Gallup shows. However, this is down from 80 percent in 1994.

Meanwhile, those opposing capital punishment for murder stood at 44 percent last year—the highest percentage since 1966. Most Americans under 55 are now against the death penalty, according to the polling.

"Capital punishment is a failed public policy, and we can see that playing out in so many ways in Tennessee this week," Abraham Bonowitz, the Death Penalty Information Center's co-founder, told Newsweek in a statement. "We can be safe from people who have committed terrible crimes and hold them accountable without executions."

The death penalty is "increasingly unpopular with the American people even as elected officials schedule executions in search of diminishing political benefits," the Death Penalty Information Center separately said.

On the first day of Trump's second administration, he signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to "pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use," and told prosecutors to go after the death penalty in all federal capital crimes where an illegal immigrant is allegedly responsible, or a law-enforcement officer is killed.

Trump simultaneously directed the attorney general to try to overrule all previous Supreme Court judgements that curbed state and federal government's efforts to hand down the death penalty.

By the end of 2025, executions across the U.S. had surged to their highest point in 16 years. A total of 47 men were put to death last year across the country.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice said it would bring back firing squads as a method of execution, and look to reintroduce electrocution and lethal gas.

Contact Newsweek editor on this story: Edward Pearcey.