The convict who survived two lethal injections in Tennessee, Christa Pike, was still in critical condition Thursday, the day after the unprecedented failure of this execution which revived questions about capital punishment in the United States. Tennessee suspended executions until further notice and ordered an independent investigation after the botched killing Wednesday evening of Christa Pike, 50, who was to be the first woman executed in more than 200 years in this Southern state.
“What we have been told is that she is in critical condition,” said one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey, urging Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee to “commute Christa’s sentence now.” “After enduring more than 20 years of solitary confinement and a complete attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Christa is the person who has suffered the greatest punishment in the history of the death penalty in the United States,” he argued.
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According to these same lawyers, Christa Pike was placed on life support and remained unconscious in a hospital in the hours following the botched execution. These same lawyers believe that problems with the intravenous lines caused the pentobarbital to be injected into his body rather than directly into his blood system. “Apparently, at no time did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not properly positioned or that the veins had burst, and that the pentobarbital was entering, in whole or in part, Ms. Pike’s body,” they wrote in the court document. Instead of “remedying this failure,” they prepared and administered a second dose of pentobarbital, his lawyers claimed.
Moratorium
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called on Tennessee to permanently desist from executing him, highlighting "the prolonged suffering - both physical and psychological - caused by several unsuccessful execution attempts." The governor, who had already refused Monday to commute his sentence, nevertheless suggested that he had not given up on the execution of Christa Pike. “My responsibility is to enforce the sentences handed down by Tennessee juries, even when it is difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do,” Bill Lee said Thursday.
Robin Maher, director of the specialized observatory Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), denounced in a press release “a botched execution without comparison in modern times”. “What is unprecedented is that a person receives two doses of a lethal solution and is still alive afterwards,” Laura Porter, director of a coalition of American organizations fighting for the abolition of the death penalty, told AFP.
The Tennessee Correctional Service said it had strictly followed the protocol adopted since executions resumed in the state in May 2025, after a three-year moratorium. The governor decreed it at the time due to failures in verifying the lethal solution administered to a convict. Republican President Donald Trump, a fervent supporter of capital punishment, spoke on this matter on Thursday, although the vast majority of executions in the country are carried out by states and not federal institutions. “It should not be very difficult” to carry out an execution by lethal injection, he said Thursday.
Since the start of the year, 29 executions have been carried out in the United States, including 16 in Florida (southeast), all by this method. According to witnesses and her lawyers, Christa Pike continued to breathe and snore audibly after two injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. “Several times she looked around the room. At one point, she asked prison officials if she was supposed to feel like that,” said Kim Chandler, an Associated Press journalist who was present as a witness.
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Judicial suspense
The United States Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, authorized this execution on Wednesday, at the end of a day of intense legal suspense. She had canceled a stay granted at the last minute in the morning by a federal appeals court in order to examine an appeal relating to the traumatic violence suffered by Christa Pike. His lawyers claim that his defense during his trial in 1996 had not invoked the mitigating circumstances which should have benefited him, including the trauma and violence, particularly sexual, suffered from a very young age.
The last execution of a woman in the United States dates back to that in 2023, in Missouri (central), of Amber McLaughlin, also the first transgender woman executed in the country. Only 18 women have been executed since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976, just over 1% of the total, according to the DPIC.
Christa Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer when she was 18. His two accomplices, also teenagers, escaped the death penalty. Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 of the 50 American states. Three others, California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, observe a moratorium on executions.
