Christa Pike is 'critically ill' after botched execution, attorney says - USA Today

Death row inmate Christa Pike remains hospitalized in critical condition days after surviving a failed execution attempt in Tennessee, her attorney said on Oct. 4.

Pike, 50, was taken to a Nashville-area hospital on Sept. 30 after receiving two doses of pentobarbital. She was intubated, on a ventilator and unconscious, and both her arms where were swollen, burned and blistered from the lethal injection drugs, according to an emergency court motion filed Oct. 2.

Attorney Stephen Ferrell told CNN on Oct. 4 that he has not yet been able to see Pike. But Ferrell said her condition "remains the same," and doctors are still working to clear the drugs from her system after the botched execution.

"She's still in the hospital on a ventilator, critically ill," Ferrell told the outlet. "We don't really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days."

Pike appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her ​body, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. Ferrell told CNN that he has not yet learned from doctors why Pike survived, and Tennessee officials also haven't released any information about how the lethal injection could have failed.

Pike's attorneys have indicated there was an issue with the insertion of intravenous line. Randy Spivey, one of Pike’s attorneys, said during an online news conference on Oct. 1 that it took about an hour to establish two lines, and he witnessed at least seven needles used on her left arm alone, one of which appeared to be bent when it was removed.

Spivey recalled hearing Pike making noises of some kind after receiving the first injection.

"Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body," Pike's attorneys wrote in the emergency motion. "Instead of remedying this failure, TDOC elected to prepare a backup set of syringes (if they were not also prepared earlier that day) and then administered another lethal dose of pentobarbital."

After the second injection, Spivey said he noticed that Pike’s right arm was turning purple.

Pike was set to be executed for the 1995 murder of her romantic rival, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend brutally tortured and killed Slemmer. The execution attempt came after a chaotic day of last-minute legal wrangling that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pike's legal team has called on Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence. Lee has called for an independent investigation and halted executions in the state for the remainder of the year.

The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office announced Oct. 3 that it had retained former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to conduct the review ordered by Lee. Stanton was tapped in 2022 to review the state's lethal injection protocol, an independent investigation which found Tennessee's department of corrections failed to consistently test lethal injection drugs for potency, purity and contaminants, systemic failures stretching back years. The findings prompted Tennessee to overhaul its execution procedures.

The new probe will seek to determine whether the state's lethal injection protocol was followed and whether new recommendations are necessary to ensure the directive "continues to be lawful and effective," the attorney general's office said in a statement. The Tennessee Department of Corrections has said it followed its execution protocol during Pike's attempted execution.

The Rev. Jeff Hood, the spiritual advisor to Jamaal Howard, the next person scheduled to be executed in the U.S., told USA TODAY in an interview that the botched execution in Tennessee is creating "a tremendous amount of anxiety" as Howard’s Oct. 7 execution date in Texas approaches.

"I thought about what it would look like for Christa Pike to be looking around and looking at her spiritual adviser and the audience through the glass and saying 'help me,'" Hood said. "I thought about Jamaal sitting there mortally wounded, or at least critically wounded, and saying 'Jeff, help me' and how do you respond to that? This situation produces a lot of anxiety for me and I think that for anybody who is in the chamber this should produce an unbelievable amount of anxiety for them too."

Hood, an Old Catholic priest based in Arkansas, has witnessed 13 executions, including the first nitrogen gas execution in the U.S. – and likely the world – carried out on Kenneth Smith in 2024.

He said that Pike's execution is an example of "what’s possible." "One of these executions could be botched at any time and at any place," Hood said.

Hood called Slemmer's murder "horrifying" but said that the botched execution was an example of society "exchanging one horror for another."

"Instead of trying to get ourselves to places where we limit the horrifying situations, we perpetuate them and call them normal," Hood said. "What happened (to Pike) is not normal."

Hood is also the spiritual advisor to Tennessee inmate Gary Wayne Sutton, whose execution was put on hold following the botched execution of Pike. He challenged Lee to attend the execution if it occurs.

"Gov. Lee, if you want these executions to go correctly, if you want to make sure there’s not another botched execution in Tennessee, then head it up yourself. Be there," Hood said.