Tennessee Halts All Executions After Christa Pike Survives Lethal Injection

NASHVILLE — The state of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday night, and could not. Officials at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution gave her two full doses of pentobarbital. She remained alive.

Pike, 50, is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. Her attorneys said she was “alive and loudly snoring” after the second dose; she was taken by ambulance to a hospital. At 8:53 p.m. the microphones were cut and the witnesses were escorted out.

Curtains rose at 7:27 p.m. Her last words: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love.” During the procedure she said something felt wrong — her attorneys later quoted her: “The vein in my arm feels like it’s about to bust.” The second dose went in by 8:26. It did not end her life.

The day had already been chaos: scheduled for 10 a.m., stopped an hour before by a 2–1 vote of the 6th Circuit, to consider her allegations of childhood sexual abuse at sentencing. Around 6 p.m. the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way without explanation; the three liberal justices dissented.

Gov. Bill Lee then halted every execution left on Tennessee’s 2026 calendar — including Gary Wayne Sutton’s December 3 date — 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, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective.” — Gov. Bill Lee, statement, Sept. 30, 2026

The failure exposes a gap in the protocol: a second set of syringes “if the inmate is not deceased” — and nothing about an inmate alive after the second. Death Penalty Information Center director Robin M. Maher called it “singular and unparalleled”: others have survived failed IV placements, she told the AP, but no one has lived after receiving the drugs.

This story, though, does not belong to Pike. It belongs to Colleen Slemmer.

Slemmer was 19, a fellow Knoxville Job Corps student, when Pike — then 18 — lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995, and tortured and killed her. Her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17, received life with parole; he admitted carving a pentagram into Slemmer’s body. Pike alone was sentenced to death.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled to Nashville hoping to witness the execution she had waited decades for. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she told the AP days earlier. She could not be reached afterward.

It was Tennessee’s second failed execution this year — Tony Carruthers’s in May was called off after an hour of failed IV attempts. The state moved to single-drug pentobarbital in 2024. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. What comes next rests with the governor’s review.