Christa Pike Survived Two Lethal Injections and May Still Face Death

Christa Pike was supposed to die on September 30. Tennessee officials gave her two doses of pentobarbital, the drug the state uses for lethal injection, and she lived through both of them. Days later she was still in a Nashville hospital under guard, and lawyers were already arguing over whether the state can try again.

Pike was 18 when she and others tortured and killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995. A jury sentenced her to death in 1996. She has spent most of the three decades since then on death row, including long stretches in solitary confinement. If the execution had gone through, she would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

The attempt did not go through. Witnesses and her lawyers said executioners struggled with the IV lines at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, then injected both syringes of the drug. Pike was still alive. Court filings that night described her as having a heartbeat and audibly snoring. She was taken to an off site hospital. Early reports put her on a ventilator and unconscious. By October 6, her legal team said she was conscious and speaking, though still receiving critical care.

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Correction said the state followed every step of its lawful protocol, that the chemical has been effective in the past, and that the rules did not allow anything further that night. Gov. Bill Lee then halted the one remaining execution scheduled for the rest of the year and ordered an outside review. Former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton, who led an earlier look at the state’s lethal injection process, was named to run it. Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada later resigned.

What happens to the death sentence itself is a separate fight. Fordham law professor Deborah Denno told the New York Post that Pike cannot be executed if a brain injury leaves her unable to understand what is happening to her. She pointed to a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling involving a dementia patient, which held that a state cannot execute someone who is not aware of the punishment. Denno also said that if Pike recovers and is found competent, her lawyers could have a strong double jeopardy argument under the Fifth Amendment.

Other scholars are less sure that blocks a second attempt. Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska, told Newsweek that existing precedent mostly favors the state. He pointed to Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, where the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment does not automatically stop a second execution after the first one fails.

Pike’s lawyers had already asked Lee to commute the sentence to life without parole. He denied clemency on September 28, before the attempt, and said he would uphold the sentence. Legal expert Michael Meltsner has said a commutation is unlikely here because of the crime and because the governor has been responsive to the victim’s family.

Her attorney Stephen Ferrell has been blunt about what the team still does not know. Speaking to CNN and the BBC, he said they cannot yet say what her physical condition will be, that she has already spent more than 30 years in prison, and that the state tried to kill her and failed. He said they have had no real signal from the attorney general’s office about whether another date will be set. For now the execution is paused, a review is underway, and nobody in authority has said whether Tennessee will come back for a second attempt once that review is done.