'She is alive.' Latest on Christa Pike after Tennessee botches execution - USA Today

There is still no word from Tennessee state officials on murderer Christa Pike's health, more than 28 hours after a botched execution that saw her live through two would-be lethal injections.

Pike's lawyer said earlier in the day on Oct. 1 that she is alive and in critical condition at an undisclosed hospital.

“We don’t have much sense of her prognosis but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving lifesaving medical care,” said Randy Spivey, one of Pike’s attorneys, during an online press conference.

That condition had not changed as of 11:30 p.m. CT Oct. 1. The previous evening, Tennessee corrections officers had begun execution procedures and lethal injections that unexplainedly did not succeed in putting her to death, causing the execution team to send for an ambulance.

She appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her ​body, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit group in Washington.

"This failed attempt is the worst we've ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era," Robin Maher, the center's director, said in a statement.

Spivey called for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her sentence immediately.

"Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty," Spivey said.

Lee said the botched execution was "a tragedy."

"There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn't have happened," Lee said.

A flurry of outrage from Pike's lawyers and supporters followed confused late-night updates. After things went awry, Lee said he was pausing the state's executions for the remainder of 2026, throwing the pending Dec. 3 execution date of Gary Wayne Sutton into question.

"Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State's most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective," Lee said.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed all its protocol, which didn't allow for additional procedures to be carried out.

"Nothing about today was normal," said WKRN journalist and media witness Tori Gessner afterward.

The botched execution left President Donald Trump bewildered.

"The medication didn’t exactly work, how does that happen?" the president said to reporters Thursday afternoon. "It shouldn’t be very difficult."

Trump’s comments came in response to a question about capital punishment. He said questions of whether the state should proceed with executing Pike were up to Tennessee.

Pike's attorneys said she was "cooperative" and "kind" throughout the botched execution, at times trying to direct officials where to place the intravenous line. They said it took about an hour to establish two lines during which Spivey said 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 her making noises of some kind after receiving the first injection. After the second injection, Spivey said he noticed that Pike’s right arm was turning purple.

“It is our understanding that there’s some blistering and burning around the sites of the injection right now on her...I don’t want to guess what that means," Spivey said.

It's not yet clear what led to the botched execution, but her attorney Stephen Ferrell said due to her blood condition and "difficult" veins, medical experts that testified on her behalf had predicted that the intravenous line could become dislodged or pierce through her veins, what's known as "infiltration."

"It sounds like that is likely to have occurred," he said. "And so that the lethal injection drugs were not going directly into the bloodstream, but were rather ending up in her arm.”

Still, Spivey said Pike endured a “full lethal injection attempt.”

“That is unprecedented. That is cruel. This should not happen again,” he said.

Ferrell said it's also not yet clear what long term damage Pike may suffer or how she felt during the attempted execution.

"So I don’t think we could ever know what it was like to go through that time but I do know that really was her biggest fear," Ferrell said. "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."

The day leading up to Pike's planned execution had already been fraught with uncertainty, as last-minute legal wrangling went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which cleared the way for the execution to proceed after hours of delay.

Witnesses to the execution said Pike uttered words moments before her intended death. She was going to leave the world in the same way she spent most of her life, "in love," said Kim Chandler, a reporter for the Associated Press.

“She said she had love for the people who were out here hating on her," Chandler said. "She closed her statement with saying, ‘I’m at peace. I’m ready to be free.’ Then something about celebrating her freedom, and then she closed with, ‘This is a happy day.’”

Gessner, one of the witnesses, said she heard Pike complain of pain: "My arm feels like it's about to burst open."

Witnesses said they were asked to leave while Pike appeared to still be alive.

Over 20 hours after Christa Pike’s would-be executioners ordered witnesses to leave the death chamber even as they could hear her snoring, the state has not released a condition update on Pike.

USA TODAY sent urgent messages to representatives at Gov. Bill Lee’s office and the Department of Corrections both on the night of the botched execution and the next morning on Thursday, Oct. 1. The state did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.

Lee told reporters on Thursday morning that he did not know what Pike’s condition was. He said he was “highly disappointed” in the botched execution and called it a tragedy.

“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” he said. “It shouldn't have happened."

State officials are facing intense criticism in the wake of Pike’s botched execution.

"The incompetence of the Tennessee DOC sets the bar at the lowest level,” Abraham Bonowitz, co-founder of Death Penalty Action, said in a statement. “There are no other words. This is an outrage. How do they sleep at night?"

A detailed timeline of Pike’s execution shows that the state of Tennessee tried to kill her for over an hour before racing to save her life.

Seven members of the news media who witnessed Pike's botched execution on Sept. 30 described an increasingly troublesome scene inside a state prison in Nashville.

The process began with Pike's last words at 7:26 p.m. CT. It ended with the state closing the curtains in the viewing chamber and ordering the witnesses to leave at 8:53 p.m. CT.

As they cleared out, the witnesses say they could still hear Pike snoring on what was supposed to be her death bed. Her lawyers say she's now in critical condition.

For a detailed timeline of the chaos in the death chamber, read USA TODAY’s account of what happened.

Attorneys for Pike said in an emergency motion that she was subjected to "unnecessary agony" after two syringes of pentobarbital failed.

"Ms. Pike has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring," they wrote.

"Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution," Pike's attorneys said in a statement to USA TODAY. "We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy."

Lee said shortly before midnight CT that he is opening an investigation into what went wrong. The review will be carried out by a third-party, Lee said, without revealing who would conduct it.

Lee also said the remaining execution scheduled in Tennessee for 2026 would not happen this year.

Sutton, 61, was scheduled for death on Dec. 3 for the 1992 murders of siblings Tommy Griffin and Connie Branam. The pause on his execution comes as advocates have argued there was no direct evidence linking him to the crime and his family has asked for a pardon.

Amnesty International called on Lee to grant clemency and commute Pike’s sentence and do the same for all other Tennessee death row inmates, according to a statement to USA TODAY.

The group also pointed to the failed execution of Tony Carruthers in May as “an extended history of botched executions” in the state.

Justin Mazzola, Deputy Director of Research for Amnesty International USA, said in the statement that "the death penalty system is broken beyond repair.”

Lee previously paused executions in 2022 and ordered a third-party review of the state's execution protocol before Oscar Franklin Smith was set to be executed.

An investigation by The Tennessean − a part of the USA TODAY Network – published in 2022 found that the state and its contractors regularly deviated from the lethal injection protocol Tennessee instituted in 2018, likely resulting in the execution of the two convicted murderers using expired, compromised or untested drugs.

The protocol used on Pike was instituted at the end of 2024, according to the Associated Press.

In 1995, then 18-year-old Pike, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, and another friend lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to the woods in Knoxville, where Shipp and Pike tortured and killed her. Prosecutors said Pike suspected Slemmer was interested in Shipp.

Shipp was sentenced to life in prison, not eligible for the death penalty at 17 when the crime was committed.

Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has said she laments that Pike has overshadowed her daughter over the years.

"I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting," Martinez told WBIR-TV in 2021. "There's not a day goes by that I don't think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was."

May Martinez, the mother of the 19-year-old murder victim Colleen Slemmer, was among those who witnessed Pike’s botched execution.

"I stood in front of that window and I watched her very, very carefully. I did not take my eyes off of her," May told People Magazine in an exclusive interview. "I wanted her to remember who Colleen was and what they’ve done and never forget that thought, no matter where she goes."

May said she drove 11 hours from Florida to Tennessee to attend Pike’s execution in Nashville. They said they watched medical staff fail to inject Pike twice with a lethal dosage of pentobarbital.

The mother of Pike’s victim says she still wants to see Slemmer’s killer dead because she has never apologized. 

"She has no remorse. She’s never had any remorse in 31 years," said May.

Pentobarbital is a sedative that typically treats seizures by calming overactive nerves in the body, according to Cleveland Clinic. It's administered as an injection into a muscle or vein in a hospital or clinic setting. It can be used for insomnia, surgery or anxiety.

Pentobarbital is a commonly used drug for legal execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

In the Tennessee Department of Correction’s lethal injection protocol, prison officials prepare one set of syringes for the lethal dose but have enough of the deadly drug on standby to build a second set of syringes if needed. Each set is made up of four syringes: one of sterile saline solution, two of 50 milliliters of pentobarbital and another of saline, according to the protocol.

The Rev. Jeff Hood, spiritual advisor to Jamaal Howard, the next person scheduled to be executed in the U.S., told USA TODAY in an Oct. 1 interview that Pike's botched execution is creating "a tremendous amount of anxiety" as Howard’s Oct. 7 execution date approaches.

"One of these executions could be botched at any time and at any place," Hood said. "What happened in Tennessee shows all of us what’s possible."

Hood called the murder of Colleen Slemmer "horrifying" but said the botched execution was 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 last night is not normal."

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

“Gov. Lee constantly talks about how he is pro-death penalty, how this is going the right way and he wants this to be clean,” Hood said. “If the buck stops with him, then why was he not there?”

Pike’s botched execution is not Tennessee’s first capital punishment disaster this year. 

In May, the state failed to execute Tony Carruthers, who was sentenced to death for a 1994 triple murder, after execution staffer Dr. Mark Fowler was unable to place a central line into the Tennessee death row prisoner. According to deposition testimony Fowler gave later, he had not placed a central line in at least 13 years and he had no current hospital privileges.

Carruthers’ sister filed a complaint afterwards with the state’s Department of Health, saying the event left her brother paralyzed. 

"Moreover, we believe our brother suffered a brain stroke, has endured extreme pain, and has paralysis of the entire right side of his body," the complaint said. "He was stabbed wide open in his chest while awake and could feel the excruciating pain during the entire procedure! Let us not forget that Tony Von Carruthers has proclaimed his innocence from the beginning of this crime!"

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee afterwards granted Tony Carruthers a one-year reprieve from execution.

Helen Prejean, a U.S. Catholic nun and a leading advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, wrote on her Facebook account Thursday that Pike's botched execution sends a strong message about capital punishment.

"The attempted killing of Christa Pike is one more exposure of the cruelty involved in the death penalty, now masked as a medicinal death - or 'putting someone to sleep,'" Prejean wrote. "The government is deliberately killing its citizens and masking it as a medical procedure — which the people involved are not trained to do."

Prejean is known for her best-selling book and subsequent movie "Dead Man Walking," based on her experiences with two convicts on death row for whom she served as spiritual adviser before their executions.

Five days before Pike's scheduled execution, Prejean had rallied on Facebook for a clemency campaign for Pike.

"Christa Pike suffered repeated child sexual abuse," Prejean wrote on the social media platform. "Her early life was marked by abuse, violence, and neglect. Her trial lawyer never explained the impact of this abuse to the jury that convicted her and imposed a death sentence. This is not justice."

Contributing: Madeline Mitchell, USA TODAY; The Nashville Tennessean; Reuters.