Tennessee halts executions after Christa Pike survives two doses

Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday night after prison staff administered both doses of pentobarbital allowed under the state's protocol, and Gov. Bill Lee responded by calling off the state's remaining 2026 execution and ordering an outside review.

The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General's Office ... and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.

Pike's federal public defenders described a different scene in emergency filings lodged while the attempt was still under way. Witnesses had seen executioners inject both syringes of lethal injection chemicals, they wrote, and Pike "has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat." She was taken from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to a hospital by ambulance.

What the protocol does not say

Tennessee's written procedure provides for a backup set of syringes when a prisoner remains alive after the first dose, and it contains no further step if the second dose also fails to cause death, according to the Associated Press.

Tennessee announced in 2024 that it was replacing its three-drug series with a single dose of pentobarbital, the chemical the Department of Correction said on Wednesday "has consistently been effective."

Journalists in the viewing room described Pike awake and complaining of pain. Tori Gessner, an anchor at WKRN who has witnessed five Tennessee executions, said Pike was heard at 7:34 p.m. saying, "My arm feels like it's about to burst open," and then asking whether that was supposed to happen. Will Puckett of WVLT said heavy snoring was the best description of the sounds she made.

A witness quoted by WVLT said, "I cannot mention enough how much happened behind a closed curtain as Christa Pike was still alive."

The second dose went in behind the closed curtain. Pike's lawyers wrote that the chemicals had been administered by 8:26 p.m. and that she was still alive and snoring, and witnesses said the snoring was audible until they were escorted out at 8:53 p.m. Her legal team said in a statement late Wednesday she was being treated at a nearby hospital.

One day, three courts

The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay about an hour before the scheduled time on Wednesday morning, WVLT reported. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that order hours later, clearing the way for the state to proceed before the warrant expired, over dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The vote was 6 to 3.

The warrant was set to expire at midnight local time.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had set the date a year in advance, issuing the warrant on September 30, 2025, and rejected Pike's constitutional challenge to the protocol on September 23. Lee denied a 226-page clemency petition on September 28, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a further request from her the next day.

Pike challenged the protocol in June, after the state abandoned its attempt to execute Tony Carruthers, arguing Tennessee could not guarantee a constitutionally compliant execution. She cited thrombocytosis, a platelet disorder she said would complicate IV placement. At a hearing in August she asked to be hanged instead, which the state refused because hanging is not an approved method there.

A doctor in both attempts

Healthcare workers spent about an hour in May trying to establish IV access to inject Carruthers with a lethal dose at the same prison, KFF Health News and WPLN reported. Maria DeLiberato, his attorney, said needles went into his arms and feet without success, and a doctor then tried to insert a central line through his collarbone. Lee ordered the attempt halted and later granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

Mark Fowler, the physician in the Carruthers attempt, also oversaw Pike's. In an October 2025 deposition, Fowler said he had not placed a central line in the 12 years since he stopped working in an emergency room and had not known the procedure could be among his execution duties. He told NPR on Sept. 24 that the doctor does not participate in the execution and only declares the person dead.

More than 40 doctors and nurses wrote to Lee two months after the Carruthers attempt, asking him to pause executions and redesign the protocol to leave health workers out of it. Their letter said the state's rules requiring pharmacists, physicians and other healthcare workers to take part conflict with medical ethics and with American Medical Association guidelines. Nine Republican state senators have joined the call for a moratorium.

As of September, the death penalty is legal in 27 states, and governors in four of them have halted all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since the beginning of 2020, 170 people have been executed in 17 states, and six states have had botched lethal injections in that time.

After the warrant expired

Pike's condition has not been disclosed. The Department of Correction said she had been transported to an off-site medical facility, and a spokesperson did not answer an emailed question from NBC News about whether she was alive. Her attorneys said late Wednesday that they had not been told her condition.

The warrant expired at midnight local time, and the department did not immediately say whether the state would try again, or when.

Any second attempt would run into a 1947 Supreme Court decision, Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, in which the court allowed Louisiana to try again to execute Willie Francis after the electric chair malfunctioned. The justices treated that failure as accidental and rejected claims of double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. Justice Felix Frankfurter indicated that repeated unsuccessful attempts could raise a different constitutional problem.

The cause of Wednesday's failure has not been established. Pike's lawyers had raised her veins, her medical conditions and the quality of the state's drugs before the attempt, but none of those has been confirmed as the reason she survived. The Department of Correction has not said whether the problem lay in IV placement, the chemical, its administration, her physiology or something else.

Pike was convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder in the killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center, who was killed in January 1995 when Pike was 18. Court documents say Pike lured Slemmer into the woods with her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and attacked her with a box cutter, a meat cleaver and a piece of asphalt.

Shipp, who was 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, and Pike was the only one of the two sentenced to death. In 2001, while incarcerated, she nearly strangled a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, with a shoelace and was convicted of attempted first-degree murder. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It was a mess," May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, told NBC News early Thursday. She said officials told the victim's family nothing and then asked them to leave, and that she learned from the commissioner that it had not worked and that Pike was being taken to a hospital. Martinez said Pike expressed no remorse.

What the state has not said

Lee said he had ordered a third-party review to determine exactly what occurred, and that the last execution scheduled for this year would not be carried out as planned. That execution, of Gary Wayne Sutton, had been set for December 3.

The statement did not say who would conduct the review, when it would report or whether its findings would be made public. The Department of Correction has not expanded on the account it issued while Pike was being driven to a hospital.