Christa Pike is conscious as lawyers seek execution records

Christa Pike, the Tennessee prisoner who survived two doses of pentobarbital during a failed execution on Sept. 30, is conscious and able to speak, her attorneys said, as they press a Nashville court to order the state to preserve evidence from the attempt.

The statement issued Tuesday was the first public word that her condition had improved since she was taken from the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution by ambulance to a Nashville hospital. Her lawyers had said earlier that she was unconscious and on a ventilator, with both arms swollen, burned and blistered. They described her recovery as medically unprecedented and her prognosis as unclear.

Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person in the United States known to have survived after execution drugs were administered. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 killing of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, who was 19, when Pike was 18. She was also the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death in more than 200 years.

Off the ventilator, still shackled

Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology and surgery in Atlanta who consulted as an expert for Pike's legal team, said the development "bodes well for a good recovery," but added that it could be weeks or months before anyone knows what her recovery will look like. He said she remains in intensive care.

Whether her competency could be restored to a level that would let the state try to execute her again is also unknown, Zivot said.

She has recovered to a certain degree that she's able to be off a ventilator and able to speak, but in no way would I announce her free of further serious risk.

"Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care," her lawyers said Tuesday. They said she remains handcuffed and shackled to the bed despite the damage to her arms, and thanked the medical workers who they said have "treated Christa like a human."

The motion in Davidson County

Pike's attorneys filed an emergency motion on Oct. 2 in Davidson County Chancery Court seeking an order that would require the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all evidence related to the execution attempt. They have asked for drug lot numbers, records and other material generated on Sept. 30, and are set to go to court to press for it.

The lawyers have told the court they believe the IV lines were misplaced, so that the pentobarbital pooled in her tissue instead of entering her bloodstream. Pentobarbital is caustic and highly alkaline, their filing says, and burns on contact with skin, tissue and veins.

Experts have compared the drug to bleach or Drano, and both of Pike's arms were swollen, burned and blistered when she reached the hospital, according to the filing.

Tennessee's protocol approves a single drug, pentobarbital, and allows a backup injection if the prisoner is still alive. The Department of Correction has said it followed that protocol, which does not set out what happens if the second dose fails. The department issued the new protocols in December 2024, under Strada, so that lethal injections could resume.

Two failed attempts this year

Pike's was the second execution Tennessee failed to complete this year. In May, health care workers could not establish complete IV access into Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of involvement in the kidnapping and murders of three people in 1994. Lee said afterward that the state would not try again to kill Carruthers for at least a year. Carruthers has maintained he is innocent.

Pike's execution was scheduled for the morning of Sept. 30 and was stayed by a federal circuit court before it began. Media witnesses spent nine hours inside the prison, barred from leaving the grounds, until the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay at the state's request. The prison system's communications director, Dorinda Carter, then told them, "It's a go."

Seven media witnesses watched from a cinderblock room with a window onto the death chamber, among them the public radio reporter Catherine Sweeney, who wrote that the stay was the first she had seen in five stints as an execution witness.

A black curtain inside the chamber hides the workers who place the IV lines, as state law requires, and is opened once the lines are in. The procedure is set out in the Lethal Injection Execution Protocol, a guidebook the Department of Correction writes for itself. There is no other regulation of executions in Tennessee.

The commissioner steps aside

Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada said he would resign days after the attempt. Lee announced on Oct. 3 that he had accepted the resignation and that Strada would leave at the end of the month. Strada said stepping aside was "in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward."

Strada became deputy director of the Arizona Department of Correction in January 2020 after working as director of operations for the private prison operator The Geo Group. Each of the three executions Arizona carried out in 2022, during his tenure, was visibly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs later ordered a review and paused lethal injections there.

The independent review

Lee's office announced on Oct. 3 that former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton would conduct an independent review of the Department of Correction's actions in carrying out the court-ordered sentence of Christa Gail Pike. The review will determine whether the protocol was followed and consider whether further recommendations are needed, the office said. Stanton reviewed Tennessee's lethal injection protocol in 2022, work that prompted the state to substantially rewrite it before executions resumed.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit, estimates that 3 percent of executions in the United States from 1890 to 2010 were botched, a figure drawn from the work of the researcher Austin Sarat. Botched executions are generally defined as those that deviate from established procedures through unforeseen issues, delays or administrative incompetence.

Federal public defenders had warned the state about the revised protocol. Kit Thomas, deputy chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Public Defender's Office for the Middle District of Tennessee, told WVLT News that the revised protocol set vague standards for who could be hired to the IV team, and that the concerns were not just foreseeable but foreseen.

Whether the state can try again

Legal scholars disagree about whether Tennessee can attempt a second execution. Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law, said Pike has satisfied the very high standard for cruel and unusual punishment and has a strong double jeopardy argument, because the state carried out every part of the process it intended and she did not die.

Michael Russo, a law professor at Seattle University, called the failed execution horrible but said he doubted the Supreme Court would stop the state from trying again on double jeopardy grounds.

Colleen Slemmer's relatives traveled from Florida for the execution with money raised through crowdfunding. Morgen Seeley, Slemmer's niece, told WSMV that Slemmer's mother had not eaten since the attempt. Phil Keith, Knoxville's police chief when Slemmer was killed in 1995, said the failure "speaks of rank incompetence" and that there need to be serious consequences.

Executions suspended through the year

Lee has suspended lethal injections in Tennessee for the rest of the year, and the state's one remaining scheduled execution has been postponed. An interim correction commissioner is to be announced at a later date, the governor's office said. Pike's attorneys have asked Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.