The condemned killer Christa Pike is unconscious, intubated, and receiving respiratory support via a ventilator after Tennessee’s unsuccessful attempt to execute her, her lawyers said on Friday, providing the first detailed account of the severity of her condition following the lethal injection.
The hospital team is working to save Pike’s life and purge the pentobarbital, the lethal drug, from her body, her lawyers said in an emergency court filing requesting an order requiring the Tennessee Department of Corrections to preserve evidence from the failed execution on Wednesday night.
Pike remains in critical condition, her lawyers said, two days after Tennessee administered two doses of pentobarbital without killing her. She sustained significant injuries to both arms, they added.
“At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not properly placed, that the veins had ruptured, and that the pentobarbital was, wholly or partly, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” Pike’s lawyers said in a filing to the Chancery Court of the 20th Judicial District of the State of Tennessee.
The filing provides the most comprehensive account to date of the medical consequences of an execution attempt that, according to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, followed the state’s established protocol. It was the state’s second failed execution this year. Lee suspended all other state executions through the end of 2026 and ordered an independent investigation into what occurred.
The lawyers for Pike said that the difficulties the execution team faced in administering the drug were related to intravenous access, an issue about which they had warned the state and the courts before the execution.
Pike, 50 years old, was convicted of the murder of her high school classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, in 1995, when Pike was 18. She would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.
