Failed Tennessee execution renews the debate over death penalty methods

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee officials have yet to explain what went wrong during the failed execution of Christa Pike, which was called off after she was given two doses of the drug meant to kill her.

It wasn’t clear if Pike was still alive on Thursday. She could be heard snoring loudly in the execution chamber Wednesday night more than an hour after the execution process began and nearly 30 minutes after a second dose of pentobarbital was administered.

Pike, who was sentenced to death for a gruesome 1995 murder, was taken by ambulance from the prison to a hospital, where she was being treated, her attorneys said.

May Martinez, whose daughter was murdered by Pike and her boyfriend and who traveled to Nashville to see the sentence carried out, told NBC News on Thursday that “it was a mess.”

The failure, which one death penalty expert described as unprecedented, led Gov. Bill Lee to postpone Tennessee’s lone remaining execution this year and to order a review “to determine exactly what occurred.” It also raises questions again about the state’s procedures and its use of single-drug lethal injections.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution Wednesday morning for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the execution an hour before it was to start, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay hours later.

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that it “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”

Tennessee changed its execution method two years ago

The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Tennessee announced in 2024 it was switching from a three-drug series for lethal injections to the single drug pentobarbital. That came more than two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs were tested properly.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.”

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year after Florida carried out an execution on Tuesday.

Pike was awake in the execution chamber

Strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber, Pike described herself as at peace.

“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said in her “last” words.

But she remained awake and at one point raised her head, asking prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. An hour after officials first raised the execution chamber’s curtains, witnesses reported that a second dose of pentobarbital was administered.

Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain until the microphone was cut off almost 30 minutes later.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late Wednesday with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and the procedure violated her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions with the Sixth Circuit court and a district court.

It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to complete an execution: In May state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The killing gained attention because of a pentagram carved on Slemmer’s body, stoking fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike’s boyfriend wasn’t eligible for the death penalty because he was 17 at the time of the killing and received a sentence of life in prison. He was denied parole last year.

Pike’s case renews the debate over the death sentence

Pike did not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argued that the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on.”

“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement.

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Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, Ed White in Detroit, Hallie Golden in Seattle and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.