A woman who was supposed to become the first female prisoner executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years is instead fighting for her life after a lethal injection went badly wrong. Christa Pike, 50, remained unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator after Tennessee prison officials failed to execute her Wednesday, according to her lawyers.
Pike has spent about three decades on death row for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational school in Knoxville. Pike was just 18 at the time of the crime. She was convicted of
first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Her execution would have made her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries. She also would have been the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment executed in the state for a crime committed as a teenager.
Instead, Pike ended up in a hospital. Her lawyers said execution personnel administered two doses of the
sedative pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville but failed to properly place the intravenous lines. They alleged Pike’s veins had “blown,” allowing some or all of the
drug to leak into tissue beneath her skin instead of flowing properly into her bloodstream.
Both of Pike’s arms were left “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency court filing by her attorneys.
Witnesses could hear her “crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure,” the lawyers said.
Pike was later taken to a hospital, where doctors were trying to clear the pentobarbital from her system. She remained in critical condition and required a mechanical ventilator to breathe, her attorneys said Friday.
The lawyers said prison officials had been warned that Pike could be difficult to place on an IV because she had small veins and thrombocytosis, a blood disorder.
“At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown,” they said in the filing.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has not provided a detailed account matching the allegations. Governor Bill Lee said the execution followed the state’s established protocol.
It was Tennessee’s second botched execution this year. Lee hassuspended further executions for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review.
Why was Pike on death row? Pike was convicted for her role in the killing of Slemmer on the
University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville in 1995. Her then-17-year-old boyfriend was also convicted of murder but
received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A third schoolmate, who acted as a lookout and later testified for prosecutors, received probation.
Pike’s lawyers had sought clemency, asking Lee to reduce her sentence to life without parole. They cited severe neglect and sexual abuse during her childhood, untreated mental illness and evidence that her mother drank heavily while pregnant. Lee rejected the request.
Hours before the scheduled execution, a federal appeals court granted Pike a temporary stay to allow further consideration of her argument that her childhood trauma had not been properly weighed at sentencing. The US Supreme Court later lifted the stay, allowing Tennessee to proceed. Pike’s lawyers are now asking a state court to order prison officials to preserve evidence from the failed execution, arguing it could show that she was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.
Instead of ending Pike’s three decades on death row, the failedexecution has now triggered another legal battle over how Tennessee carries out the death penalty.