Tennessee Cancels Remaining Scheduled Execution After Botched Lethal Injection Fails to Kill Christa Pike
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee has called off its remaining scheduled execution this year after the state’s attempt to put Christa Pike to death Wednesday night failed, leaving the only woman on Tennessee’s death row alive after two doses of lethal injection drugs.
Pike was taken to a hospital, state officials said, but they did not release details about her condition. The failed procedure set off an extraordinary sequence: Gov. Bill Lee halted the state’s remaining scheduled execution this year and ordered a comprehensive third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities,” Lee said in a statement Thursday, “and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective.”
Pike, convicted in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, had been set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in about 200 years. Earlier Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that her execution could proceed, overriding a last-minute district court order that had paused her execution. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
According to an emergency motion filed by Pike’s attorneys, correctional staff administered two doses of pentobarbital around 8 p.m. local time. Pike still had a heartbeat, had not lost consciousness and was “audibly snoring” when her legal team asked the courts to stop the procedure later that night.
About an hour after the execution began, at 8:53 p.m. local time, media witnesses were told to leave the area, the Associated Press reported. Pike’s attorneys noted in the filing that the curtain in the execution chamber had gone down twice during the ordeal.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed the state’s lawful, established execution protocol, which was approved by the Attorney General’s Office. The department said the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective and that the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out that evening.
Kim Chandler, an AP reporter who witnessed the attempted execution, said at a news conference late Wednesday that Pike at one point “looked toward prison officials and asked if it was supposed to feel that way.” Chandler recounted that Pike’s mouth fell open several times and that she began to loudly snore for several minutes.
According to Chandler, the blinds to the execution chamber closed for the final time at about 8:06 p.m. When media witnesses were asked to leave at about 8:53 p.m., Pike could still be heard “loudly snoring, clearly very alive.”
Will Puckett, a reporter for CBS affiliate WVLT and another media witness, said that after the curtain closed, doors could be heard opening and closing as Pike’s lawyers and spiritual adviser moved in and out. At 8:53 p.m., he said, the microphone was cut off after the warden said, “Will the witnesses please exit the area.”
In a supplemental court filing, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said Pike had been transported to a hospital where she was receiving medical care. The filing did not say which hospital or provide details about her condition.
Pike’s attorneys said the state had “once again failed to carry out a lawful execution.” In a statement to CBS News, they said the concerns Pike raised had proved 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.
“Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital,” the statement said. “We have not been informed as to her condition.”
The failed execution followed a day of rapid legal maneuvering. Pike was initially scheduled to be put to death at 10 a.m. local time Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit then ruled that a short pause was needed to resolve new claims from Pike’s legal team. The Supreme Court later vacated that stay, allowing the execution to go forward.
Sotomayor, in her dissent, wrote that the Court’s decision to vacate the stay interfered with the Sixth Circuit’s routine administrative handling of a capital case and unnecessarily prevented that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.
Pike’s attorneys have argued that counsel in her original criminal case failed to properly present her extensive childhood experiences with abuse and that the defense was therefore ineffective. They have also pointed to her history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, as well as psychological conditions including PTSD, bipolar disorder and congenital brain damage. Those issues, they say, were not adequately represented at trial.
In a letter written earlier this week, before Lee denied her clemency petition, Pike said she was not afraid to die but was nervous about the process. She thanked those who rallied for the governor to intervene and said she was “at peace” regardless of the outcome. CBS News obtained a copy of the letter from her spiritual adviser, Rev. Mikey Noechel, along with another note containing handwritten lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “To ——.”
Pike, now 50, has been incarcerated since 1995 for the murder of her former classmate, Colleen Slemmer. According to court records, Pike and Slemmer were students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville when Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, 19, allegedly over comments Slemmer had made about Pike’s relationship. Pike’s boyfriend and another friend helped carry out the attack, the records said.
The case has drawn international attention and outcry, with the United Nations recently joining local advocacy groups in calls for Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence. Critics have focused on the childhood abuse and untreated mental illness from which Pike suffered at the time of the killing — factors that now play a much larger role in jury sentencing decisions than they did at Pike’s trial. U.N. experts also said the decades Pike spent in isolation on death row, as the sole woman awaiting execution in Tennessee, should amount to unlawful torture.
After Lee announced that the clemency bid had been rejected, Pike’s attorneys said they were “deeply saddened and heartbroken.” They noted how much their client had changed while incarcerated.
“The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists,” the statement said. “Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women.”
One of her attorneys, Luke Ihnen, told CBS News that “in her classic Christa way, she has spent her last days worried more about her friends, family and legal team than herself.”
In a statement included with her clemency petition, Pike said she recognized that the ramifications of her crime had been “huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives.”
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected,” she said. “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Prosecutors and jurors in Pike’s original case, as well as the judges who presided over that trial and her numerous appeals, have often described Slemmer’s murder as brutal and horrific. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Knoxville News-Sentinel after Pike’s conviction in 1996 that she believed Pike was “evil,” and that the state “should kill her right away.”
Trial records show Slemmer was repeatedly beaten and cut with both a meat cleaver and a box cutter over the course of 30 minutes to an hour in a wooded section of the University of Tennessee’s campus. When her body was found, a piece of her skull was missing, and pentagrams had been carved into her forehead and chest — details that fueled a media firestorm and coincided with the “Satanic Panic” that swept the country in the 1980s and 1990s. Fellow students said Pike later bragged about the killing, telling one person that she had removed and kept the missing piece of Slemmer’s skull as a “souvenir.”
Pike’s boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, and her friend Shadolla Peterson both helped carry out Slemmer’s murder, according to court records. Because Shipp was 17 at the time, he was not eligible for the death penalty and instead received a lifetime prison sentence. His parole was denied last year, but the case will be reviewed again toward the end of 2031. Peterson received probation after testifying against Pike at trial.
Although Pike confessed to the crime, her legal team has filed numerous appeals challenging her death sentence and questioning whether she would still receive it if her case were tried today. When Pike was sentenced at 20 in 1996, she was the youngest woman sent to death row in the United States’ modern era of capital punishment. If Wednesday’s execution had gone forward, she would have been the only U.S. inmate put to death since that era began who was 18, 19 or 20 when their crime was committed, according to her attorneys and death penalty researchers. It would also have marked Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since at least 1820.
Her attorneys have said Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect, as well as psychological conditions including PTSD, bipolar disorder and congenital brain damage, were not adequately represented in her original trial. They have also highlighted that had Pike been just months younger at the time of the murder, she would not have been eligible to face capital punishment in Tennessee.
“In sentencing Pike to death, we rule out the possibility that her crime was a product of the immature mind of youth rather than fixed depravity,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Stranch wrote in a concurring opinion on one of Pike’s unsuccessful appeals in 2018. Although she sided with the majority against Pike, Stranch acknowledged the controversy around the death sentence, writing that “we presume that she is incapable of reform even though the stories of other teenage killers, many of whom have been rehabilitated behind bars, reveal other possibilities.” Stranch also authored the order granting Pike’s stay on Wednesday.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told CBS News last year that declining national support for capital punishment and the low rates of death sentences handed down to teenagers suggest Pike would have received a different sentence in contemporary times.
“Society’s view of who is truly deserving of a death sentence has changed in the years since Christa Pike was sentenced,” Maher said. “Her young age, mental illness, and the physical and mental abuse she suffered at the time of her crime would likely persuade a jury today she is not someone who should receive a death sentence.”
Women rarely receive death sentences in the United States and make up just 1% of death row inmates nationwide. Of around 2,000 people currently set to be executed around the country, just 45 are women, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which publishes data on capital punishment but does not take a position on it. Seventeen of those women have been sentenced to death in California, which has a moratorium on executions and has not carried one out in more than 20 years.
Throughout most of Pike’s time in prison, she was not allowed to interact with other people. Among the lawsuits her attorneys filed alongside their appeals was one that likened her incarceration to solitary confinement because she was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row for all but three of the years she spent behind bars. Another woman, Gaile Owens, was held in the same facility as Pike for those three years before her death sentence was ultimately commuted, but the two never had contact, court filings show.
Arguing that decades of isolation violated Pike’s constitutional rights, the lawsuit ended in a settlement with the state in 2024 that granted her more opportunities to interact with other inmates. As her execution date approached, Pike was returned to solitary confinement, which Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol requires for 14 days before an execution, her lawyers said in their final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. That appeal was denied on Tuesday.
The failed execution is likely to intensify scrutiny of Tennessee’s capital punishment system and of lethal injection practices nationwide. It also raises immediate questions about how the state will proceed with any future executions, what the independent review will find, and whether Pike’s case will further shift public debate over the death penalty, particularly for defendants who were young, mentally ill or severely abused at the time of their crimes.