Tennessee Reviews Lethal Injection Process After Botched Execution
Time · LC · trust 64/100
Tennessee is reviewing its lethal injection process after a botched execution attempt left 50-year-old Christa Pike in critical condition.
Pike was receiving “lifesaving care” at a Nashville hospital on Thursday, having survived two shots of the lethal drug pentobarbital , her attorneys said in a press conference . It is the first time in the modern era of the U.S. death penalty that a person received lethal injection drugs and survived, according to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center .
“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin Maher, the center’s director, said in a statement on Thursday.
Pike’s case has drawn scrutiny over the state’s decision to proceed with her execution, despite repeated warnings about its lethal injection protocol from her attorneys, who said she was subjected to “chemical torture.”
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, ordered an independent investigation of the lethal injection process late on Wednesday. Lee also suspended executions in the state till the end of the year, the second moratorium on executions during his time in office due to concerns over the state’s lethal injections.
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee told reporters on Thursday, describing the botched execution as a “tragedy.” But he stopped short of suggesting that he might heed renewed calls to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison.
“The people of Tennessee have determined that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for the most heinous crimes in the state,” Lee said. “The people of Tennessee make that decision, and my job is to make sure then that those sentences are carried out.”
Lee had denied Pike’s clemency request to commute her sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Monday.
Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of then-19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, has been on death row for more than 30 years. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the U.S. since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement to media outlets late Wednesday that it “had followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney general’s office.” It described the lethal injection as “consistently effective.”
Lee defended the agency, saying it followed protocol.
TIME has reached out to the state’s Department of Correction and Pike’s attorneys for comment.
“There was no reason to expect it to not work,” Lee said. “But something didn’t go well or right last night, and we need to find out why.”
Randy Spivey, an attorney with the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, said Pike endured a “torturous” experience in the execution chamber. Pike’s left arm was pierced by at least seven needles, and her right arm turned purple, he said. She said her arm felt like it was “about to explode,” her attorneys said.
Pike’s attorneys suggested that the drugs may have entered her arm tissue instead of directly into her bloodstream. They described it as “chemical torture.”
Pike remained cooperative throughout the multiple execution attempts and tried to help her executioners, her attorneys said. “She over and over again said, ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here. Please try here,’” Spivey said.
“We may never know what all she was suffering through, either because she can’t remember it, she can’t tell it, or it overwhelms her,” said Stephen Ferrell, from the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee. Pike’s greatest fear was not of dying but “of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”
“And that’s what happened,” Ferrell said. “Minus the death.”
Witnesses to the execution said late Wednesday that Pike could still be heard breathing and snoring an hour after her executioners administered two rounds of pentobarbital, including when the curtain closed and when witnesses were escorted out of the chamber.
Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital as its execution protocol in December 2024. Pike’s lawyers previously raised concerns about the source of the drugs, while Reuters reported on Thursday that that information had been withheld. E.U. law bars pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs for use in executions, leading some U.S. prison systems to procure the drugs from compounding pharmacies in processes often shielded by state secrecy laws.
In legal filings , Pike’s lawyers had raised concerns that Pike’s execution by lethal injection might be compromised by her small veins and medical history of thrombocytosis. But their petitions to the state to use alternative execution methods, like death by hanging, were denied.
Pike’s lawyers said in a statement that their concerns proved true: “difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
In a June court filing , Pike’s attorneys pointed to the state’s failed execution of Tony Carruthers in May, when medical staff failed to find a vein. Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.
The American Medical Association and American Nurses Association prohibit doctors and nurses from participating in executions under their professional ethics standards. Some states have used execution personnel without current medical licenses. Tennessee, however, requires the participation of physicians, or other medically trained personnel in an execution.
After the botched execution of Carruthers, more than 40 doctors and nurses penned a letter to Lee, calling on him to redesign the protocol to exclude health care workers, arguing that it is at odds with their commitment to preserve life.
Lee also paused executions and ordered an independent review in 2022 after it…
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