Christa Pike was hospitalized after her attempted execution in Tennessee failed

American death row inmate Christa Pike was transferred to hospital after an attempt to execute her with two doses of lethal substances failed, according to her lawyer.

Her legal team filed an urgent request to halt the execution while the process was underway, saying: “Mrs Pike lost consciousness, her heart is still beating, and the sound of her snoring can be heard.”

One of her lawyers told the BBC that Pike, 50, was "undergoing life-saving medical procedures" in hospital after being given two injections of pentobarbital.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slimer. The execution of her death sentence sparked a legal battle at the last minute.

The matter ended up allowing the implementation of the two lethal injections after a decision by the US Supreme Court.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed Slimer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.

May Martinez, Slimer's mother, was among those who wanted to carry out the death sentence. "Things were messy," she told NBC News after Wednesday evening's events.

The attempted execution took place at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville around 8 p.m. local time.

Pike was given two doses of the chemical pentobarbital, and the curtain in the witness room was closed twice, according to the Associated Press.

The agency added that the media were asked to leave at some point.

She also mentioned that the execution protocol in Tennessee stipulates that there will be a second set of drug injections if the person being executed does not die after the first set. But it does not explain what happens if the person is still alive after the second set.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said, in a statement reported by American media, that he had ordered a “comprehensive third-party review to determine exactly what happened.” He added that the last execution scheduled for this year would not be carried out as planned.

Pike's execution attempt was not the first in the state during 2026 that did not go as planned. In May, the execution of the death sentence for Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, was postponed after a vein to inject the lethal substance could not be found.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections said it stands by all measures it took during the attempted execution of Pike.

“The Tennessee Department of Corrections followed all steps of the state’s lawful execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” department spokeswoman Dorinda Carter told The Tennessean.

She added: "The substance used in lethal injections within the protocol has consistently proven its effectiveness, and the protocol does not allow for additional measures beyond what was implemented this evening. Christa Pike has been transferred to an outside medical facility."

“The State of Tennessee again failed tonight to carry out a lawful execution,” Pike's legal team also said in a statement to The Tennessean.

The statement added: “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike have proven to be true: difficult access to veins, damage to veins, decreased effectiveness of pentobarbital, and lack of availability of emergency medical care when things go wrong as expected, all under a protocol that remains shrouded in mystery.”

Pike's lawyers filed an emergency request to halt the execution and provide medical care after the lethal injection appeared to have failed.

District Judge Clifton L. Corker issued a ruling noting that “medical personnel have begun providing the care described in the application to the court.”

Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, who told the BBC that he was retained by Pike's legal team as a medical expert, said the level of pentobarbital in the blood was likely insufficient to cause respiratory arrest and cardiovascular failure during the execution.

“It is very possible that she suffered a brain injury as a result of the delay in starting resuscitation operations,” Zivot added in an email.

The death penalty was attempted after a number of legal appeals submitted by Pike's lawyers failed at the last minute.

The US Supreme Court had thwarted two separate attempts to stop the execution by lethal injection.

Late Wednesday evening, the highest court in the United States overturned a stay of execution that had been issued by a lower court earlier in the day. The lower court had granted a temporary stay, saying it needed more time to consider the arguments presented in Pike's case.

The Supreme Court had earlier rejected an appeal filed by Pike's lawyers, in which they said that the jury was not given an opportunity to consider mitigating evidence related to documenting her exposure to sexual abuse in her childhood before she was sentenced to death in 1996.

The defense said Tennessee had for years argued in court that Pike was lying about being sexually abused as a child.

But the state said in a recent hearing on the method of her execution that it did not doubt that she had been subjected to sexual abuse and rape.

This week, Tennessee's governor rejected a clemency request from Pike, the only woman on death row in the state.

In her petition for clemency, Pike said she intended to hit Slimer, not kill her, but was unable to "retract."

Pike said in a statement issued in this regard: “I was an eighteen-year-old girl suffering from a mental illness. It took me many years to realize the extent of what I had done. And I needed more years to accept the number of people whose lives were affected by it.”

She added: "You took the life of a daughter, a sister and a friend of other people. It disgusts me now to think that I was capable of committing such a crime."

The 1995 murder caused a widespread media sensation in Knoxville, Tennessee, after Colleen was found with an inverted pentagram, a symbol associated with Satanic groups, engraved on her chest. Baek denied that she was the one who engraved this symbol.

"Not a day or even a minute goes by that I don't think about Colleen," Martinez said. "The holidays are the worst."

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been executed in the United States, compared to 1,663 men. This represents about 1 percent of the total death sentences carried out in the United States.