Christa Pike's execution appears to have failed after lethal injection

Yet another last-minute twist. The execution of Christa Pike, a woman sentenced to death in Tennessee for a murder committed more than 30 years ago, appears to have failed, according to witnesses and the condemned woman's lawyer who told the media that she was still breathing and snoring audibly after receiving the lethal injection. “It looks like it didn't go as planned,” said investigative reporter John North of WBIR, who witnessed the scene. “When we left the building, as far as we knew, she was probably still alive,” he added.

The Tennessee Prison Administration has not released any information on the planned execution of Christa Pike, who was to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries, nor responded to requests from AFP. According to the BBC, his legal team has filed an emergency request to stay the ongoing execution.

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Hours earlier, the US Supreme Court rejected a final attempt to prevent the execution of Christa Pike. A federal appeals court had however suspended the execution of the American in the morning in a brief decision rendered about an hour before the scheduled time for her death, at 10:00 a.m. local (3:00 p.m. in Paris) in Nashville. The court of appeal granted him a “short reprieve”, of an unspecified duration, to give time to decide on the admissibility of a defense appeal aimed at taking into consideration the sexual violence suffered in her childhood by Christa Pike. Violence that the state of Tennessee recognized for the first time during a hearing in August, without changing its position. But the Supreme Court of the United States with a conservative majority, urgently requested by Tennessee, canceled this reprieve at the end of the day, against the opinion of the three progressive judges (out of nine), authorizing the State to execute the condemned woman.

Requests for sentence commutation

The execution order issued by the courts of Tennessee runs in principle until Wednesday at midnight (Thursday 7:00 a.m. in Paris). If execution is not carried out within this deadline, the authorities will have to request a new date. If this execution is carried out on Wednesday, it will be the 30th since the start of the year in the United States, including 16 in Florida (southeast) alone.

The last execution of a woman in the United States dates back to that, in 2023 in Missouri (central), of Amber McLaughlin, who was also the first transgender woman to be executed in the country. In total, 18 women have been executed in the country since the reestablishment of capital punishment in 1976, or barely more than 1% of executions, according to the specialized observatory Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

The Republican governor of Tennessee (south), Bill Lee, on Monday rejected requests to commute Christa Pike's sentence despite calls from numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. The Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, had already rejected its final request for a stay on Tuesday. Tennessee then urgently appealed to the High Court to request the lifting of this suspension, citing “the State’s interest in a final resolution” of this case as well as the right of the victim’s loved ones to “turn the page”. Christa Pike's lawyers instead urged the Court to refrain from any intervention, arguing that "the execution of Ms. Pike would taint the justice system and undermine public confidence in its integrity."

Bipolar disorder

Christa Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student in the Job Corps training program in Knoxville, when she was 18, in a romantic rivalry case. Her two accomplices, also teenagers, her boyfriend at the time, aged 17, and another young girl aged 18, escaped the death penalty. The first was sentenced to life imprisonment and the second to a suspended sentence in exchange for her testimony against the other two.

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Christa Pike's lawyers claim that her defense during her trial in 1996 did not invoke the mitigating circumstances which should have benefited her, in particular the trauma and violence, particularly sexual, suffered from a young age. She was diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress caused by the violence she suffered during her childhood.

In early September, experts commissioned by the UN called for the execution to be suspended and his sentence to be commuted. States continuing to apply the death penalty must “strictly respect the guarantees of international law”, including full respect for the rights of the defense, “individualized consideration of all mitigating circumstances, including a history of trauma and violence and a real opportunity to request a pardon or commutation of sentence”, according to these experts.

In total, 47 executions took place in the United States in 2025, compared to around twenty per year for a decade, the highest level since the 52 recorded in 2009. The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 American states. Three others, California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, observe a moratorium on executions by decision of the governor.