Convicted murderer Christa Pike is still unconscious and on a ventilator in a Nashville-area hospital after a botched lethal injection attempt on Wednesday 28 September at a Tennessee prison, her lawyers said in a court filing on Friday 30 September.

Prison officials administered two doses of the sedative pentobarbital to Pike (50), who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Witnesses reported that Pike remained awake longer than expected and was later heard loudly snoring before being rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital.

“She is intubated, on a ventilator and remains unconscious,” Pike’s lawyer Luke Ihnen wrote in a filing with a Tennessee court. He said medics were working to save her life after she arrived at the hospital with both arms “swollen, burned, and blistered” – injuries consistent with IV infiltration, in which the drug enters surrounding tissue rather than the bloodstream.

In a separate federal appeals court filing, Pike’s legal team said that when they asked a court to halt the execution after it went awry, attorneys for the state argued the Tennessee Department of Correction “had no obligation to render life-saving care” to Pike.

Governor orders review and halt

Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee – who had previously denied Pike clemency – halted all further executions in the state through the end of 2026 and ordered a comprehensive third-party review of the execution protocol. The Tennessee Department of Correction said it “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol.”

Pike’s was the second failed execution in Tennessee this year. In May, the state halted the execution of Tony Carruthers after medical staff were unable to establish an IV line for more than an hour.

Family and advocates react

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who was among the witnesses, told WJXX television that the state “owes me a big apology” and that it had failed her family. “All I wanted was justice,” said Martinez, who raised money to travel from her home in Florida to witness the execution.

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The New York Times the event was “the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era. There is no precedent.”

President Donald Trump told reporters that an execution “shouldn’t be very difficult,” questioning how it could fail. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk urged Tennessee not to make a new attempt to execute Pike.

Pike’s lawyer Randy Spivey called for the governor to commute her sentence, arguing she had “endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty” after more than 20 years in solitary confinement and a full lethal injection attempt. Pike’s legal team had sought clemency on the grounds of her young age at the time of the crime, mental health issues, a history of childhood sexual assault and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Context

Had the drugs killed Pike, she would have been the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in more than two centuries. Since 1976, only 18 women have been executed in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Pike was convicted of the January 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Job Corps centre in Knoxville. Slemmer was lured to an abandoned slaughterhouse, beaten and fatally stabbed; Pike was 18 at the time.

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