Christa Pike was receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived two attempts by Tennessee to execute her with lethal injections, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after a jury convicted her of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Her botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the second this year in Tennessee, highlights the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections and in finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.
“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know ‹that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee, a Republican, told reporters.
“It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”
Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. Prison officials injected two syringes into Pike, her lawyers said in alate-night court filing, causing her “unnecessary agony” but not killing her.
Tennessee officials said the execution was halted, and she was taken away in an ambulance.
Kayla Hackney, a Department of Correction spokesperson, declined to answer questions about Pike’s condition on Thursday.
Pike would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries.
