“That’s what happened, minus the death,” attorney Stephen Ferrell said Thursday, Oct. 1, describing Christa Pike’s greatest fear: a prolonged, painful, traumatic death. The latest Christa Pike update came that afternoon, when her legal team said she was in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care, CNN reported.
Pike, 50, was injected twice with pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday night, Sept. 30, but did not die. For a full account of that night, see our report on how the Christa Pike execution failed.
Christa Pike update: Lawyers seek commutation
Attorney Randy Spivey urged Gov. Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence, saying she had endured punishment “greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
Spivey said the execution team spent an hour trying to place an IV line and used at least seven needles in her left arm. “I’m haunted by last night,” he said.
In a joint statement, Spivey and attorney Kelly Gleason listed what they saw as the failures: “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.”
Even that Christa Pike update came secondhand. Ferrell said no one on the legal team had been able to see her, and he declined to speculate about what she is experiencing.
Lee orders a review but stands by executions
Lee, a Republican, ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and called off the state’s last remaining execution of 2026 while it proceeds, NBC News reported. He told reporters Thursday morning that he did not know Pike’s condition and was “disappointed” by what happened.
He also signaled that executions will continue. “My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult,” Lee said.
Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office backed the review. “We need to know what happened,” it said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it “followed every step” of its approved protocol and that its lethal injection chemical “has consistently been effective.”
Christa Pike update exposes a protocol with no next step
Tennessee’s 44-page lethal injection protocol, a copy of which was obtained by the Death Penalty Information Center, calls for a backup set of pentobarbital syringes “if the inmate is not deceased.” According to CNN’s review, it says nothing about what happens if the backup dose also fails.
Amherst College professor Austin Sarat, who has written several books on the death penalty, told CNN that Pike is “the first person to survive a lethal injection where the drugs reached her.” He told NBC News there have been fewer than 10 true failed executions in the last 80 years.
The best-known earlier case is Willie Francis, who survived Louisiana’s electric chair in 1946 and was executed on a second attempt. Our look at prisoners who survived execution attempts covers the others.
The victim’s mother: ‘It was a mess’
May Martinez, whose 19-year-old daughter Colleen Slemmer was killed in 1995, wanted the execution carried out. “It was a mess,” she told NBC News, adding that officials asked the victims’ families to leave without explaining what had gone wrong.
Pike was 18 when she and two other teens attacked Slemmer, a fellow Knoxville Job Corps student, on a remote part of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in January 1995. Pike’s then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, received a life sentence, and Shadolla Peterson pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, The Tennessean reported.
The court fight that preceded Wednesday’s attempt is detailed in our coverage of the Christa Pike appeal. We will add any further Christa Pike update on her condition or the state’s review as it becomes available.
