January 1, Tennessee Governor Faces Pressure After Failed Execution Leaves Killer Alive

Wyatt’s Take

• Botched lethal injection shows state officials cannot be trusted to carry out justice fairly or cleanly
• Christa Pike survived two full doses of execution drugs, forcing the governor to halt all remaining death sentences this year
• Defense lawyers and death penalty opponents are now demanding her sentence be commuted instead of enforcing the original court ruling

Christa Pike’s lawyers are calling on Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison after she remained alive following two doses of lethal injection drugs in what one death penalty expert described as an unprecedented event.

Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder of a classmate, was rushed to a hospital Wednesday night after surviving her planned execution. Her lawyers said on Thursday that she remains in critical condition and is receiving “lifesaving medical care.”

“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” attorney Randy Spivey said during a news conference. “But we know she is alive right now.”

The botched execution prompted Lee to halt any further efforts to carry out Pike’s execution and the state’s other execution scheduled this year. He also ordered a third-party review into Pike’s execution, which he called “deeply disturbing.”

Pike’s lawyers are now calling for her death sentence to be commuted.

Her lawyers filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, noting that she was in “unnecessary agony” and arguing that putting her through another attempted execution violated her right to be put to death without cruel and unusual punishment.

“Given the experience that Christa Pike went through last night, after a childhood and young adulthood that was full of gender based violence and abuse, it would be irresponsible for state officials to put her through another attempt at execution. I really hope that in light of what she’s experienced, that the governor will decide to commute her sentence to a life in prison and not put her through another torturous experience in the execution chamber,” Robin Maher told Fox News Digital.

Before the planned execution, about 25,000 people had signed a petition to Lee asking him to commute Pike’s death sentence to life in prison.

An appeals court had halted her execution early on Wednesday, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay hours later to clear the way for her to be put to death.

Pike, 50, would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. She would have been the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year, driven largely by Florida’s record increase in inmates put to death since 2025.

Since the Supreme Court resumed the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been executed in the U.S., making up about 1% of all executions in the country.

This was the second time this year that Tennessee had a failed execution. In May, Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was not executed because officials could not find a suitable vein for an IV line, so the drugs were not administered. Multiple states have previously paused executions after cases of officials being unable to find a suitable vein for an IV line.

In 2024, Tennessee switched from a three-drug series to a single drug, pentobarbital, for lethal injections. About two years earlier, the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith, who was convicted of first-degree murder, and acknowledged it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs had been tested properly. He was eventually put to death by lethal injection last year.

Several others have survived medical problems linked to a failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one had stayed alive after receiving the drugs until Pike on Wednesday.

“This, unfortunately, is not the first time that Tennessee officials have botched an execution. There is really a quite shameful history in Tennessee of executions going wrong, although Christa Pikes really stands out. There’s never been someone who has received lethal doses of execution drugs and survived until last night. This is a completely unprecedented event, even in the context of Tennessee’s other botched executions,” Maher said.

The Death Penalty Information Center lists 65 botched executions across the U.S. in the modern era.

In the execution chamber, Pike said she was at peace and “ready to be free.”

“This is a happy day,” she said.

But she remained awake, and even complained about a feeling in her arm. Witnesses reported that Pike complained of pain in her arm and remained conscious after the first dose.

An hour after officials first raised the curtains, witnesses said that a second dose of pentobarbital was administered. Pike could still be heard snoring behind a closed curtain until the microphone was cut off nearly 30 minutes later.

Pike, who was 18 at the time of the crime, and her then-17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of the fatal stabbing of a classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, as he was a minor and not eligible for the death penalty.

The third defendant, then-18-year-old Shadolla Peterson, who acted as a lookout while her two friends carried out the attack, testified for the state and avoided the death penalty.

Pike did not dispute that she helped kill Slemmer, but supporters argued that her mental illness and allegations of severe sexual abuse when she was young should be considered. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after the killing.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” she previously said. “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

Wyatt Matters

Middle America expects the justice system to deliver swift and certain punishment for heinous crimes. When the state cannot even carry out a sentence properly, it raises serious questions about whether the system is protecting victims and their families or simply creating more confusion and delay.