Christa Pike’s lawyers are asking Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her death sentence, meaning reduce it to life in prison, after she survived two lethal injections in a failed execution Wednesday night.
Pike, 50, was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead, neither the initial dose nor the backup dose of pentobarbital, the sedative the state uses for lethal injections, killed her. She was taken to a hospital, where her lawyers said she was in critical condition.
According to her attorney, the execution team spent an hour trying to administer the drugs, and he counted at least seven needles in her left arm. Witnesses said Pike was still snoring when the microphone in the execution chamber was cut off more than an hour into the attempt.
“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” her attorneys said in a statement that night. The words “once again” point to the state’s previous execution of Byron Black, who told witnesses he was “hurting so bad” as he lay on the gurney.
At a press conference Thursday, attorneys Randy Spivey and Stephen Ferrell called on the state to rule out another attempt, describing what Pike went through as a torturous ordeal. They said Pike was actually helping the execution team try to place her IV lines. Ferrell said she had feared complications because of a lifelong blood disorder that makes it difficult to get needles into her veins. “Throughout her life, she’s explained to us that she had trouble having blood drawn,” he said.
Pike had raised that same concern in court before her execution date. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, she argued that Tennessee’s lethal injection process would be unconstitutionally cruel because of her medical conditions.
Governor Lee said he was “highly disappointed” by the failed execution. He ordered a third party investigation into the state’s execution procedures and called off Tennessee’s other execution scheduled for 2026. Pike’s lawyers say a review is not enough.
For now, Pike cannot be executed right away. Her execution warrant expired at midnight, which means the Tennessee Supreme Court would have to set a new date before the state could try again.
The night was chaotic from the start. About an hour before the scheduled execution, a federal appeals court halted it to review claims from her lawyers about the abuse she suffered as a child. The U.S. Supreme Court then cleared the way for the execution to proceed.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the failed execution “completely unprecedented” and joined the calls for Lee to commute Pike’s sentence. Before the execution attempt, about 25,000 people had signed a petition asking the governor to spare her life.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps, a training program for low income young people. Pike and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and stabbed Slemmer to death on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus. Pike was 18 at the time, making her the last person in Tennessee sent to death row for a crime committed at that age, the youngest age at which someone can receive the death penalty.
Her attorneys have long argued that her trial lawyers failed to show the jury the full extent of the sexual abuse, violence and neglect she endured as a child, and that she has grown into a woman with deep remorse for her crime.
