Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike has been taken to hospital after an attempt to execute her by two lethal injections failed, her lawyer says.
Her legal team filed an emergency motion to halt the convicted murderer’s execution as it was happening, saying: “Ms Pike has lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring.”
One of her attorneys told the BBC that Pike, 50, was now “being provided life-saving measures” in hospital after two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Her execution was the subject of a last-minute legal battle.
This culminated in the US Supreme Court allowing the lethal injections to go ahead.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
Slemmer’s mother May Martinez was among those who wanted the execution to take place. Speaking to NBC News after Wednesday evening’s events, she said: “It was a mess.”
The attempted execution took place at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville at about 20:00 local time (01:00 GMT on Thursday).
Pike was given two doses of the chemical pentobarbital, and the curtain in the witness room was closed twice, the AP news agency reported.
Media were at some point asked to leave, the news agency said.
AP added that Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes in case the person being put to death does not die after the first set. But it does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
In a statement reported by US media, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred”. He said the year’s last remaining execution would not go ahead as planned.
The attempted execution of Pike was not the first in the state in 2026 that did not unfold as planned. The execution of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed in May after staff were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal drug.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has said it stands by all the actions it took during the attempted execution of Pike.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” department spokesperson Dorinda Carter told the Tennessean newspaper.
“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 has been transported to an off-site medical facility,” she said.
Pike’s legal team said in a statement to the Tennessean newspaper: “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution.
“We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be 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.”
Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to stay her execution and provide medical care after the lethal injection was apparently botched.
District Judge Clifton L Corker issued a ruling noting that “medical personnel have begun to administer medical care as requested in the motion”.
Dr Joel Zivot, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine who told the BBC he had been retained by Pike’s legal team as a medical expert, said she likely never achieved a sufficient blood level of pentobarbital to cause apnoea and cardiovascular failure during the attempted execution.
“It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” Zivot said in an email.
The attempted capital punishment went ahead after multiple last-minute legal challenges by Pike’s lawyers failed.
The US Supreme Court had thwarted two separate efforts to stop the lethal injection.
Late on Wednesday, America’s highest court overturned a reprieve granted by a lower court earlier in the day. The lower court had granted a pause, saying it needed more time to consider the arguments in Pike’s case.
The Supreme Court had previously dismissed an appeal by Pike’s lawyers, who had argued the jury did not get the chance to weigh mitigating evidence of Pike’s documented history of childhood sexual abuse, before they sentenced her to death in 1996.
The defence said that for years, the state of Tennessee had argued in court that she lied about being sexually abused as a child.
But at a recent hearing about her execution method, the state said it did not dispute that she had suffered sexual abuse and rape.
Tennessee’s governor denied a clemency request this week from Pike, the only woman on the state’s death row.
In her clemency petition, Pike said that she intended to beat Slemmer, not kill her, but that she was unable to “put the brakes on”.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” she said in a statement. “It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
