MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Christa Pike survives a failed execution in Tennessee and remains in critical condition

Pike, 50, was given both doses of pentobarbital set out in the state protocol — two 50-millilitre syringes — at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville

Christa Pike, the only woman on death row in the US state of Tennessee, survived a lethal injection execution attempt on Wednesday and remains in critical condition in hospital, her lawyers said. Her defence has asked Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence.

Pike, 50, was given both doses of pentobarbital set out in the state protocol — two 50-millilitre syringes — at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Witnesses said she was still breathing and could be heard snoring nearly an hour later, when they were escorted out of the room. She was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital. “Christa is alive right now. We don't have a sense of her prognosis, but we do know that she is alive and receiving life-saving medical care,” Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender said on Thursday.

The Department of Correction said “every step of the state's lawful and established execution protocol” approved by the Attorney General's office had been followed, but did not explain why the procedure was not completed or give details of her condition. The defence alleged difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital and a lack of emergency medical care, and criticised the secrecy of the protocol. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University's School of Medicine and an adviser to Pike's legal team, told the BBC the drug probably never reached a sufficient level in her blood and that she was likely to suffer brain injury.

Pike was convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in January 1995, when she was 18. The victim's family has demanded answers following the failed procedure. Had it been completed, it would have been the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than two centuries.

The state adopted its single-drug protocol after a three-year pause: Governor Lee halted executions in 2022 when an investigation found prison officials had not followed their own drug-testing rules, and they resumed in 2025. In January of that year, then US Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew the federal pentobarbital-based protocol, citing the risk of unnecessary pain and suffering. In January 2026, Pike sued the state, arguing that a blood disorder made the method unconstitutionally cruel in her case; a judge declined in August to block the execution.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, seven of the twenty execution attempts carried out in the United States in 2022 had visible problems.