Christa Pike, a Tennessee death row inmate, remains in critical condition and on life support after the state’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection failed, according to her lawyers.
Pike, 50, is unconscious and being treated in hospital after two doses of pentobarbital were administered during the execution attempt at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday night.
Her lawyers said medical staff are working to keep her alive and remove the drug from her system. They also filed an emergency motion asking a Tennessee court to order the preservation of evidence from the failed execution.
According to the filing, Pike is intubated and dependent on a mechanical ventilator to breathe.
Her attorneys said attempts to establish intravenous lines went wrong, causing both of her arms to become swollen, burned and blistered after pentobarbital apparently leaked into the tissue beneath her skin.
They said Pike’s doctors had previously warned that her small veins and a blood disorder known as thrombocytosis could make inserting the IV lines particularly difficult.
The lawyers alleged that members of the execution team failed to recognise that the lines had not been properly placed.
“At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” they said in the court filing.
The filing also stated that witnesses could hear Pike “crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has said the state followed its established execution protocol. Following the incident, however, he suspended further executions in Tennessee for the remainder of 2026 and ordered an independent review into what went wrong.
The failed execution was the second botched execution attempt in Tennessee this year, increasing scrutiny of the state’s lethal injection procedures.
Pike was sentenced to death for her role in the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a vocational school classmate at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Pike was 18 when the crime occurred. Her execution would have made her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries and the only person in the modern era of capital punishment in the state executed for a crime committed as a teenager.
Her then-17-year-old boyfriend was also convicted of murder after being tried as an adult but received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A third person involved in the case, who was 18 at the time and served as a lookout, testified for prosecutors and received probation.
Earlier this week, Governor Lee rejected Pike’s clemency request, which sought to have her death sentence changed to life imprisonment without parole.
Her lawyers had cited a history of severe childhood neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes, as well as untreated mental health problems. The petition also pointed to evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy and that this may have affected Pike’s brain development and impulse control.
The US Supreme Court had lifted an 11th-hour stay of execution on Wednesday after a federal appeals court temporarily halted the execution to consider Pike’s argument that her childhood trauma had not been properly considered during sentencing.
Following the failed execution, Pike’s lawyers asked the Tennessee Chancery Court to preserve evidence from the procedure, arguing that it could support their claim that state officials violated her constitutional rights by subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment.
Pike remains the only woman currently on Tennessee’s death row.
