By Jonathan Allen
Oct 1 (Reuters) – Christa Pike was receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived two attempts by Tennessee to execute her with lethal injections, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after a jury convicted her of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Her botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the second this year in Tennessee, highlights the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections and in finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.
“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee, a Republican, told reporters. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”
Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. Prison officials injected two syringes into Pike, her lawyers said in a late-night court filing, causing her “unnecessary agony” but not killing her.
Tennessee officials said the execution was halted, and she was taken away in an ambulance. Kayla Hackney, a Department of Correction spokesperson, declined to answer question’s about Pike’s condition on Thursday. Pike would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries.
Most countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Pike’s case showed that the US should follow suit.
“The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel,” Turk said in a statement.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her. Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Emma Farge, Steve Gorman and Arlene Eiras; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Mark Porter)
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