Christa Pike Survived the Two Doses Tennessee’s 44-Page Protocol Allowed

After the backup set of syringes, Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol gives the execution team two more steps and then stops. A designated member of the Special Operations Team documents the Lethal Injection Chemical Administration Record, and the warden announces that the sentence has been carried out and directs the witnesses to exit. The document, 44 pages in its 2025 version, contains no instruction for a prisoner who is still alive after the second dose. The Tennessee Department of Correction said so itself on the night of Sept. 30: “The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”

Christa Pike walked into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution that evening prepared to die, according to the 460-word statement she dictated to her attorneys from the prison infirmary and released on Oct. 30, her first public comments since the attempt. “I had made my peace,” she said in the statement. “I had told the people who loved me, supported me and stood by me through the years I was grateful for them.” Several days later, she said, she woke up alone in a hospital, confused and in pain. “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak.”

She has spent the month since in the prison’s medical ward, largely isolated, she said, and the isolation has brought back the conditions of the 28 years she spent in solitary confinement. Pike was 18 when Colleen Slemmer, 19, her Job Corps classmate, was killed in Knoxville in January 1995. Pike was sentenced to death at 20 and is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. “I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger,” she said in the statement. “But healing is not the same as being okay.” She thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who treated her with what she called compassion, dignity and respect, and she said she was searching for meaning in what happened. “I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured,” she said.

Pike’s attorneys filed their warning in January 2026. The complaint ran to more than 350 pages in Davidson County Chancery Court and challenged the protocol the Tennessee Department of Correction had announced on Dec. 27, 2024. The new text had been cut from 106 pages to 44. The complaint said it “does not remedy” the faults an independent review had found after the attempted execution of Oscar Franklin Smith in 2022. Reviewers had concluded the department operated “in a task-oriented, tunnel-vision manner that failed to appreciate the interwoven nature of the lethal injection process as a whole.” The filing called the replacement “devoid of details, omits certain information, or is otherwise vague,” and said it did not state the source of the pentobarbital supplier, how it was procured, or whether the drug was compounded or manufactured. Records obtained by the Tennessean and reported by the Death Penalty Information Center show the state has spent nearly $1.2 million on lethal-injection drugs since January 2023. The payments were $525,000 and $650,000, and the records gave no source, quantity, price per dose or expiration date for the drugs. The complaint’s central warning, quoted by CNN, was direct: “The new protocol does not provide for any life saving measures, in violation of the Plaintiffs rights under the United States Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution in the event that the execution fails.”

Hanging was the alternative Pike’s attorneys proposed, citing her blood disorder, her difficulty with IV access and her history of trauma, and in May the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the transferred complaint without prejudice. In July the court appointed a senior judge to examine one claim: that execution by an all-male team would be unconstitutional given her history of childhood sexual abuse. In August that judge concluded her team had not shown a substantial risk of pain, serious illness or needless suffering. The execution went ahead on Sept. 30, delayed from a scheduled 10 a.m. start by a last-minute legal fight in which a federal appeals court paused it and the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the pause, and the team that entered the chamber that evening was working from the 44-page text.

Attorney Randy Spivey, who witnessed the attempt for the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, described the struggle to set the lines in a declaration filed Oct. 22. The IV team began at 6:34 p.m. and used about 10 needles, according to Spivey’s account, which was reported by the Associated Press. The right-arm line was set within six minutes. The left arm resisted. Pike winced and grimaced as needles moved inside it, and team members warned that a vein “might be blowing,” then said “I think it’s blown,” then said “Let’s regroup.” At 7:24 p.m., Spivey wrote, the team “seemed satisfied that the lines were set and exited the chamber.” About 10 minutes later Pike said, “I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns.” Staff kept returning to check her left arm as she made snoring-like sounds, strained, flinched and appeared to struggle to breathe. Her attorneys say she afterward developed a blood clot in her arm and pneumonia and could not eat.

The first set of syringes was administered at about 7:40 p.m., after the blinds opened and Pike said her last words. A five-minute wait and a doctor’s examination found her alive, and the second set, Set B, followed at about 8 p.m. The blinds closed, the doctor examined her again, and the record was to be documented and the witnesses sent out. Catherine Sweeney of Nashville Public Radio, who witnessed the attempt, put the position plainly afterward: “The protocol doesn’t talk about what happens if you do this twice and they’re still alive. I don’t think that that was something that was planned for.” The department’s statement after the attempt was that it had “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” which was true of the steps the protocol contained.

At 8:40 p.m., the first 911 call came from someone inside Riverbend whose identity has been withheld from the public records. The caller could not give dispatchers the verification code required to show the call was not a prank or a swatting attempt, according to the dispatch recordings obtained by the Associated Press. At 9:03 p.m. a dispatcher relayed that supervisors had been informed the call was false and that no medical assistance was needed at the prison, and four minutes later a responder reported someone at the gate insisting the emergency was real while the prison’s Central Control said it had not made the call. At 9:08 p.m. Pike’s attorney Kelly Gleason called separately and said, “My client, Christa Gail Pike, is undergoing a state execution. She has completed the stages of the protocol and last we knew from the attorney who is present, she is still alive and breathing and needs immediate life-saving care.” Central Control confirmed the call was legitimate at 9:11 p.m., 31 minutes after the first call, and responders entered. Pike was intubated and spent days on a ventilator, was awake and speaking on Oct. 6, standing and walking on Oct. 8, and was discharged back to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center on Oct. 10.

On May 21, the state halted Tony Carruthers’s execution after more than an hour of trying to establish the backup IV line the protocol requires. The primary line was secured. The backup and an attempted central line were not, and counsel for Carruthers said he had been punctured more than a dozen times. Gov. Bill Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve. Dr. Mark Fowler, the physician involved in that attempt, was also involved in Pike’s, according to NPR and WSMV reporting, though accounts differ on what he personally did in each procedure. The Death Penalty Information Center, which documents executions, recorded seven people before Pike who survived failed attempts, and in every one the attempt was called off because no IV line could be set and no drugs were administered. Pike is the first to survive after the drugs themselves were given, and the center’s executive director, Robin Maher, called the attempt “the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era.” In Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber (1947), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a second execution attempt after a failed first one did not violate the ban on double jeopardy. It did not violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment or the guarantee of equal protection either.

May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, traveled to Riverbend with her husband to witness the execution. She told WTLV afterward, “I think the state owes me a big apology.” Martinez described watching Pike talk and laugh after the injections, in an account reported by the Christian Post. She told First Coast News, “She killed my daughter and I don’t want to see another child or another person hurt like she did,” and said, “Here we are, 31 years, and you’re laughing in my face again.” Lee, who ordered a comprehensive third-party review, halted Tennessee’s remaining 2026 executions and announced the resignation of corrections commissioner Frank Strada, told reporters on Oct. 28 that he was not inclined to commute Pike’s sentence. “I suspect her sentence will be the same as it was before, unless determined otherwise by the courts,” he said. He added, “The sentence wasn’t carried out in this case, and that’s the reason that there’s an investigation.” His administration was finalizing a successor to Strada, and the Pike review is the second protocol review he has authorized.

Chancellor I’Ashea Myles of Davidson County Chancery Court reopened Pike’s January challenge on Oct. 8, finding she had shown “extreme, unique, exceptional, or extraordinary circumstances,” and on Thursday the court gave her until late January to file an amended complaint reflecting Sept. 30, with extra time because of her medical condition. No new execution date has been announced. Pike’s attorneys have urged Lee to reduce her sentence to life imprisonment. In asking him to commute the sentence, they said she had endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty, and Lee has said he expects the sentence to stand unless the courts decide otherwise.

The evidence from the chamber is under a court order to be preserved, covering the drugs, syringes, IV lines, tubing and other equipment used on Sept. 30. At the October hearing, Assistant Attorney General William Ayers was asked whether Pike’s execution would be rescheduled. “I can’t answer that question,” he said.