Tennessee halts executions after Christa Pike survives 2 doses of lethal drug

Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 11am Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the US Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her lawyers said in court filings late Wednesday. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled”.

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to the execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7.27pm, showing Pike strapped to a gurney.

Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.

By 8.26pm, execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.

Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8.53pm. At that time there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area.

Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter told media witnesses she was unable to immediately provide information about what happened.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late Wednesday to the US Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and it was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions in the Sixth Circuit Court and district court.

The motion also asserted that the Department of Correction should begin life-saving measures. “Failure to provide such care constitutes deliberate indifference to legitimate, serious medical needs.”

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case garnered widespread attention in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution. In May state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

Pike was initially scheduled to be put to death in the morning, and witnesses had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay. That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been put to death, representing about 1 per cent of all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the US this year after Florida carried out an execution on Tuesday.

Tennessee announced in 2024 that it was switching from a three-drug series for lethal injections to the single drug pentobarbital. That came more than two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged that it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs were tested properly.