Death row inmate taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections

The execution of a death row inmate in Tennessee has been put on hold after she survived two doses of a lethal drug.

Christa Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said.

She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.

Pike had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday for the murder she committed in 1995 at the age of 18, and would have been the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start, and hours later, the US Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Emergency vehicles arrive at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. / Credit: AP

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said in a statement that he has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that the remaining scheduled execution will not take place this year.

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”.

The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled”.

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

Colleen Slemmer was murdered in 1995 in Tennessee. / Credit: AP

Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27pm, showing Pike strapped to a stretcher.

Pike described herself as at peace, and in what she thought would be her last words, she said: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love.”

But Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.

By 8:26pm, execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.

Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53pm. At that time there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late on Wednesday to the Tennessee Supreme Court, and other US courts, seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution.

They said she was in “unnecessary agony” and it was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in the city of Knoxville.

Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995.

Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satan, into her body.

Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.

The case garnered widespread attention in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike did not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argued that the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse.

Pike was initially scheduled to be put to death in the morning, and witnesses had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay.

That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

The attorney general’s office appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that halting the execution at the last moment traumatised Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s attorneys.

Later in the day, the high court cleared the way for the execution to proceed. The conservative majority did not explain their order, while the three liberal members signed a dissent that said Pike’s claims deserved a closer look.

The looming execution date renewed debate over the death penalty for young offenders in the US.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike’s death sentence is an outlier because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had such sentences vacated.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on”.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement.

Slemmer’s mother, however, had travelled to Nashville in the hopes of witnessing the execution of her daughter’s killer, saying she had waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Saturday.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women in the US have been put to death, representing about 1% of all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the US this year after Florida carried out an execution on Tuesday.

Tennessee announced in 2024 that it was switching from a three-drug series for lethal injections to the single drug pentobarbital.

That came more than two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged that it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs were tested properly.

In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.