Christa Pike remains in critical condition after Tennessee botched her lethal injection Wednesday night, with her lawyers calling the failed attempt cruel and Gov. Bill Lee ordering a third-party investigation.
Emergency crews pulled the condemned murderer from the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville after the state spent about an hour trying to kill her and failed.
NBC News reported she was still alive Thursday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after she was set to die, and was receiving lifesaving medical care. Her lawyers said she was in critical condition. Neither had seen her in the hospital.
Pike was supposed to become the first woman Tennessee has executed in more than 200 years. Instead, the lethal-injection attempt collapsed into a public failure, a governor’s stay, and an outside investigation the state now says it must hire.
Lawyers Randy Spivey and Stephen Ferrell, who represent Pike, described the Wednesday night attempt in blunt terms at a Thursday afternoon news conference.
Spivey said the team used at least seven needles on her left arm over the course of an hour. At least one needle looked bent when it came out. The state delivered at least two full doses of pentobarbital. Five minutes after the second dose, he said, it was clear she was still breathing.
Her arm turned purple. Blistering and burning marked the injection sites. Pike complained during the process that her arm was hurting and felt like it was “about to explode.”
Spivey said members of the media could hear her “breathe and choke and struggle while the state worked in secrecy.” Curtains were drawn. An ambulance was called at 8:50 p.m. Spivey said lifesaving care appeared to come in the ambulance, not in the chamber, though he could not be certain what happened behind the curtain.
He put it this way:
"I’m haunted by last night."
And:
"Last night was not just inefficient; it was cruel and it was torturous."
Ferrell said the drawn-out failure matched the very outcome Pike had feared most. She had lifelong venous problems and had asked for a different method. Dying was not her chief dread, he said. A long, painful, traumatic death was.
"I do know that that really was her biggest fear. It was not a fear of dying. It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death, and that’s what happened minus the death."
Ferrell also said no one may ever fully know what she went through, because trauma can wipe memory or overwhelm a person past clear speech.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee addressed the collapse Thursday morning. He stayed Pike’s execution until a third-party investigation can determine what went wrong Wednesday night. He said he would hire a team to examine the circumstances. He declined to detail her medical condition.
Lee’s statement was direct:
"This is a tragedy. There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn’t have happened."
Spivey answered that he hoped the governor means it, because the attempt was carried out in the name of every Tennessean.
Pike’s attorneys have appealed the execution. Spivey said he was given an emergency Tennessee Supreme Court number to call if something went wrong. The call went to voicemail. Last-minute efforts to stop the execution before the attempt had already failed.
None of the chaos in the chamber erases why Pike was strapped down in the first place.
In 1995, when she was 18, Pike and two teenage accomplices tortured, slashed, and fatally beat Colleen Slemmer, Knoxville police said at the time. Pike was convicted and sentenced to death. She has sat on death row for decades.
That is the crime the state was finally trying to answer with a lawful sentence. Instead, the public got a broken procedure, a surviving inmate in critical condition, and lawyers describing secrecy, voicemail, bent needles, and a killer who kept breathing after multiple doses.
Ferrell floated possible causes, including IV infiltration tied to her vein problems. The full medical picture is not public. Hospital details remain thin. The lawyers themselves have not been able to see their client.
Basic questions remain open. What exact damage did the needles and drugs do? Will Pike remember the hour in the chamber? Was any meaningful aid given inside the room once it was obvious the doses had failed? Who was on the execution team, and which protocols did they follow step by step?
Lee’s promised outside review is supposed to dig into those points. Until it does, Tennessee is left with an incomplete death sentence, a critical patient, and a victim’s family that has waited since 1995 for finality the state still has not delivered cleanly.
Capital punishment is written into law for the worst crimes. A torture murder of the kind Knoxville police described in Slemmer’s case is exactly the kind of crime that sentence was built to answer. A government that cannot carry out that sentence without turning the chamber into a prolonged medical emergency fails at a basic duty.
Colleen Slemmer never got a second chance. A state that claims to deliver justice owes her memory a system competent enough to finish the job it started.
