The Failed Christa Pike Execution, and What Comes Next

On Wednesday night, Tennessee's attempt to carry out the Christa Pike execution went wrong. Prison officials at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville gave the fifty-year-old death row inmate two doses of pentobarbital, and she was still alive afterward. According to reporting from the Associated Press, Pike could be heard snoring behind the execution chamber curtain until staff cut the microphone off and escorted the witnesses out. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, and her attorneys said late Wednesday that they had not been told about her condition.

The botched Christa Pike execution set off an immediate political scramble. After the Christa Pike execution failed, Governor Bill Lee said in a statement that he had ordered "a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred," and that Tennessee's remaining scheduled execution for this year will not take place. Pike's lawyers filed an emergency motion with the US Supreme Court on Wednesday night, arguing she was in "unnecessary agony" and that continuing to carry out the sentence would violate her right against cruel and unusual punishment. They also asked the corrections department to provide her with lifesaving medical care.

What happened inside the execution chamber

Pike had been scheduled to die at ten in the morning for a murder she committed at eighteen, a case that would have made her the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two hundred years. But the morning started with legal chaos. With witnesses already gathered at Riverbend, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to halt the execution so it could weigh whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered at her sentencing. Hours later, the Supreme Court threw out the stay and cleared the way for the Christa Pike execution. The conservative majority did not explain the order; the three liberal justices signed a dissent.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in that dissent that vacating the stay "unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike's claim." By the evening, curtains were raised at seven twenty-seven to show Pike strapped to a gurney. Media witnesses said she remained awake through the early part of the procedure and at one point raised her head to ask officials whether her arm was supposed to feel that way, as reported by the Associated Press. By eight twenty-six, the witnesses were told a second dose had been given. She kept snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut at eight fifty-three and the witnesses were asked to leave.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that staff "followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General's Office." The problem, as the AP noted, is what the protocol leaves unsaid: it calls for a backup set of syringes if the inmate is not dead after the first set, but it says nothing about what to do if the inmate is alive after the second.

The crime that put her on death row

The Christa Pike execution traces back to a January night in nineteen ninety-five, when Pike and her boyfriend lured nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a Knoxville job training facility, into a wooded area near the University of Tennessee. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp later admitted he was the one who carved a pentagram into her chest. The case drew national attention partly because the occult details fed the satanic panic of that era, as the AP reported.

The three defendants met very different fates. Shipp was seventeen at the time of the killing and received life in prison with the possibility of parole. Shadolla Peterson, eighteen, testified against the other two and received probation. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in nineteen ninety-six and sentenced to death at twenty, making her one of the youngest women in the country to receive a death sentence. She did not deny the killing. In her clemency petition, Pike said she had only meant to fight Slemmer and described a frenzied attack she could not stop, writing that she had been a mentally ill kid of eighteen and that it took her years "to even realize the gravity of what I'd done." Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Parade.

Her legal team argued for years that the jury never fully weighed her severe childhood abuse and untreated mental illness, and that her eighteen-year-old brain was not fully mature. They also pointed out that Tennessee has sentenced eight people to death for crimes committed at eighteen in the modern era, and the other seven sentences were overturned or reduced, according to Black News. The victim's mother, May Martinez, told the AP she wanted the sentence carried out after waiting decades. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen," she said. Martinez said her daughter would have turned fifty-one in September.

Why experts say this has no precedent

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the Christa Pike execution was "singular and unparalleled." As KFF Health News summarized from the New York Times, seven other people have survived an execution because the team could not find a vein, but nobody has ever survived after actually receiving the lethal drugs. Maher called the episode the worst botched execution of the modern era, saying, "There is no precedent."

The botched Christa Pike execution was also Tennessee's second failed execution this year. In May, officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, convicted of a nineteen ninety-four triple killing, after executioners spent more than an hour trying and failing to place an IV. That history makes the Pike failure harder to dismiss as a fluke. Tennessee switched in twenty twenty-four from a three-drug sequence to single-drug pentobarbital, more than two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged it had failed to test its lethal injection drugs properly, the AP reported.

What happens now

The question is whether Tennessee can legally try the Christa Pike execution a third time, and whether anyone should want it to. Lee's statement framed the halt as a matter of duty: "Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State's most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective." His office says the review will be independent, and the execution of Gary Wayne Sutton, scheduled for December, is off the calendar.

The broader numbers tell a stark story. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in nineteen seventy-six, eighteen women have been executed in the United States, about one percent of all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Had the Christa Pike execution gone as planned, Pike would have been the thirtieth person executed in the country this year, the first woman put to death in Tennessee since eighteen nineteen, and the first person in the state's modern era executed for a crime committed at eighteen. Pike was the only woman on Tennessee's death row, and she still is. GenZNewZ's September 30 news quiz covered her clemency fight the day before it happened, and more long-form stories appear in the Deep Dives section.