Christa Pike Survives Failed Tennessee Execution, but Her Condition and Legal Fate Remain Unclear

Christa Pike survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection on Wednesday, but the state’s failure to carry out the death sentence has left her in critical medical limbo and her legal case in largely uncharted territory.

Pike is intubated, on a ventilator and unconscious in a Nashville-area hospital, her attorneys said in a court filing Friday. She is receiving lifesaving care after being injected with two ostensibly fatal doses of pentobarbital, they said.

“She is being treated for the serious effects of the pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms,” attorneys Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen said in a statement.

Pike’s legal team filed an emergency motion Friday asking a court in Nashville to require the Tennessee Department of Correction to “protect and preserve all evidence related to the State’s failed attempt to execute her on Wednesday night.” They also sought an expedited hearing. The Department of Correction declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She had been set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Instead, her case is now at a standstill, with courts, prison officials and the governor’s office confronting questions that have no clear answers under Tennessee law.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, announced Thursday that a third party would conduct a “thorough and comprehensive” review of Pike’s case. CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.

“The Governor has appropriately called for an investigation,” the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement. “We need to know what happened.”

The administration has not informed Slemmer’s family of what might come next for Pike, Robert Bracewell, executive director of the Justice Coalition, told CNN.

“They are devastated and exhausted,” Bracewell said Friday.

Bracewell, who has helped Slemmer’s parents navigate the process, said the family is “mad at the state for not being helpful or forthcoming as to what is next.”

Lee also halted the execution of death row inmate Gary Sutton, which had been scheduled for December. Sutton’s attorneys said in a statement that they were thankful for the pause, adding that “nobody should be forced to suffer the way Christa Pike did.”

The moratorium is the latest interruption in Tennessee’s stop-and-start use of capital punishment in recent years. Lee similarly paused executions in 2022 for a review, and earlier this year the state failed to carry out a lethal injection on a death row inmate after struggling to find a vein.

Pike was initially scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning, but last-minute legal appeals delayed the procedure until later in the day. The execution protocol began in the early evening, and she gave her last words at 7:26 p.m., according to media witnesses. After two doses of the drug cocktail, she was snoring and appeared to be alive, the witnesses said.

“None of it was normal,” said Catherine Sweeney, a reporter for WPLN. “I covered all the executions last year and most of the ones this year. We haven’t seen anything like it. It went really poorly.”

The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed its protocol throughout the failed execution.

“The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” the department said in a statement Wednesday. “The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”

Randy Spivey, one of Pike’s attorneys, said the governor’s call for a review of the execution protocol does not go far enough. He called on Lee to commute her sentence, saying Pike had endured punishment “greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”

Pike’s attorneys said they had warned the court beforehand that her vein issues would make a lethal injection difficult to carry out.

“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,” attorneys Spivey and Kelly Gleason said in a statement.

What happened Wednesday was essentially Pike’s “biggest fear,” Ferrell said.

“It was not a fear of dying. It was a fear of prolonged, painful, traumatic death. That’s what happened, minus the death,” he said.

The failed execution has also drawn attention to the state corrections commissioner’s record with unsuccessful lethal injections.

Commissioner Frank Strada was deputy commissioner of corrections in Arizona from 2020 until 2023, when he accepted the top corrections job in Tennessee. All three executions held in Arizona during Strada’s tenure were “visibly problematic,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Those 2022 executions were Arizona’s first since 2014 and prompted the state’s governor to call for an independent review of execution protocols, triggering another pause on capital punishment. Arizona announced that review weeks after Lee promoted Strada to his current post in Tennessee.

While it is not uncommon to have a “botched” execution—when something differs from official protocol—it is exceedingly rare for an execution simply to fail, said Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor and author of several books on the death penalty and lethal injection.

“Those cases where people survive an execution create a real dilemma for the legal system. Now what?” he said.

Sarat said there is some legal precedent for inmates who survived an execution being put to death again.

In a case 80 years ago, 16-year-old Willie Francis survived an execution via the electric chair in Louisiana because of a malfunction. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that a second execution would violate the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution and its protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The Court rejected his appeal, and he died in a second electric chair execution.

Similarly, in a 2009 case, Ohio personnel attempted to execute Romell Broom by lethal injection but were unable to access a vein and establish an IV line. Broom later argued that a second execution attempt would violate the double jeopardy clause and protections against cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled against him in 2016, saying that setting the IV line was only a “preliminary step” to an execution, so a second execution attempt would not be considered a double jeopardy violation. Broom ultimately died of Covid-19 in 2020 while still on death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Still, Pike’s case is unique because the lethal drugs actually entered her system, Sarat said.

“So we’re in kind of unprecedented territory with Pike in the sense of she survived her execution,” he said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Dakin Andone, Meg Tirrell, Meridith Edwards, Lauren del Valle and Sneha Dhandapani contributed to this report.

For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com.