The Law and Botched Executions
Christa Pike is alive after Tennessee tried to execute her on 30 September 2026. The death sentence is still in force. A second attempt is legally possible. Hanging and a firing squad are not, unless the law changes.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps. Pike was 18 at the time. Her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was spared the death penalty. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, and she is the only woman on the state's death row.
The attempt itself was already a compressed day. An appeals court stayed the execution that morning. The US Supreme Court lifted the stay, and the state pressed on before the warrant day ran out. Witnesses were brought in at 6:41 p.m. The blinds opened at 7:26 p.m. Pike gave a final statement. The injection started at about 7:34 p.m.
What failed is still not established. Her lawyers say two syringes of pentobarbital were given, she did not lose consciousness, she still had a heartbeat, and she was audibly snoring. Media witnesses described her as somewhat alert, lifting her head, and asking whether a burning pain in her arm was normal. The curtains were closed for nearly an hour. Breathing and snoring could still be heard. The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed the protocol approved by the Attorney General, that the protocol does not allow further procedures after the second set, and that she was taken to an off-site medical facility.
By Thursday she was in critical condition and receiving life-saving care. Her lawyer, Randy Spivey, said there was no clear prognosis. One physician told the BBC that a delayed resuscitation could leave a brain injury. That is speculation, not a finding.
The public theories are the ones her lawyers had already pleaded: difficult vein access, blown veins, and degraded pentobarbital, under a protocol they say is secret. The state says the chemical has consistently worked. This was the second Tennessee failure this year. In May an execution was called off because staff could not find a vein. No one in the modern era is reported to have survived after the lethal-injection drugs were actually administered.
Governor Bill Lee has postponed the only other execution still set for 2026, that of Gary Wayne Sutton on 3 December, and ordered an independent review of what happened to Pike. He called the result highly disappointing.
Surviving does not cancel the sentence. A failed execution is not an acquittal, and double jeopardy has not been treated as a bar to a second attempt. The live arguments are narrower. The warrant for 30 September is spent, so the state needs a new warrant after the review. Counsel will argue that a second attempt, after this one, is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, and that any brain injury or ongoing medical crisis makes her unfit to be executed. The governor can also commute. Spivey has already asked him to.
A different method is not available just because this one failed. Tennessee authorises lethal injection. A prisoner whose crime predates 1 January 1999 may choose electrocution. Pike's crime was in 1995, so the electric chair was already an option. Electrocution is also the backup if injection is held unconstitutional or the drug cannot be obtained. Only if electrocution itself is held unconstitutional does the statute fall back to "any constitutional method."
Hanging and a firing squad are not on that list. Pike had asked for an all-female firing squad. Tennessee is not one of the states that authorises one. In August her lawyers proposed hanging, the method last used on a woman in the state. The state said it had neither the equipment nor the legal authority. The judge agreed, while allowing the possibility of an all-female execution team.
The legislature could add a method. A court could not invent one from this failure alone. Under the Supreme Court's method cases, a prisoner challenging a protocol has to point to a feasible, readily implemented alternative that significantly reduces the risk of severe pain. Pike tried that with hanging and a firing squad and lost, because neither is lawful or set up in Tennessee.
So the sequence now is medical outcome, then the review, then either a new lethal-injection warrant, an election of the electric chair if she makes one, a commutation, or fresh Eighth Amendment litigation. Not a gallows, and not a firing squad, unless Nashville changes the statute. One internet personality suggested the state use exercise bans, as in the Lindsay Clancy murder, but of course, that would be cruel and unusual punishment, and unconstitutional: 8th Amendment.
In the alternative, there is an argument here against the death penalty.
