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Christa Pike, the only woman currently sentenced to death in Tennessee, has filed a lawsuit in Davidson County Chancery Court challenging the state’s revised lethal injection protocol.
Christa Pike
The suit, filed on Jan. 8, argues that the new protocol — it relies on a single drug, pentobarbital, to induce respiratory and cardiac arrest, instead of the three-drug cocktail Tennessee used for capital punishment between 2018 and 2020 — violates the U.S. and Tennessee constitutions in part due to Pike’s “unique medical conditions.”
You can access Pike’s complaint here.
The new protocol went into effect in December 2024, the latest twist in the state’s complex history with the death penalty. This protocol, the suit reads, “is plagued with the same issues that have marked botched executions for decades: secrecy, intentional omission, inattention to detail, and untrained and unlicensed prison personnel attempting to fill a medical role.
“Because of these failures, the new protocol is sure or very likely to result in unnecessary and superadded pain and suffering, terror, and disgrace.”
Pike is scheduled to be executed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Sept. 30.
Pike is on death row for a murder she committed in 1996, when she was 18. Pike and Colleen Slemmer were both participants in a Knoxville job-training program for troubled teens. According to filings, Pike believed Slemmer was attempting to steal her boyfriend. At trial, witnesses testified that, along with an accomplice, Pike allegedly hit Slemmer over the head with some asphalt, dragged her to the woods, tortured her and slit her throat with a box cutter. Pike was the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era — if she had been 17 at the time of the murder, she wouldn’t have been eligible for the death penalty.
Pike was later convicted of the 2004 attempted murder of an incarcerated woman when the prison was evacuated during a fire.
Her attorneys spoke of Pike’s youth at the time, and her “horrible childhood,” which involved sexual abuse and neglect. In September 2024, her attorneys won a settlement to end 25 years of de facto solitary confinement, which resulted from Pike being the only woman in the state sentenced to death. As such, the lawsuit argues, the mandatory 14-day isolation period before the execution is cruel and unusual punishment.
In addition to taking issue with the protocol’s opacity, the lawsuit argues that the limitation on clergy, which “excludes” Pike’s spiritual adviser from the execution, restricts her First Amendment right to practice her “sincerely held religious belief of Buddhism.” Oscar Smith, Byron Black and Harold Nichols all received exceptions to the 12-hour “blackout” of contact with a spiritual adviser pre-execution. Pike’s attorneys tell the Nashville Banner, “It’s our belief that Christa’s spiritual adviser would not be permitted in the execution chamber."
Also, the protocol’s lack of on-site emergency medical services in the event of execution failure violates the Eighth Amendment, the lawsuit argues.
The suit also states that Pike has experienced thrombocytopenia — a blood condition — as well as bipolar disorder, PTSD and “small veins that make insertion of a needle difficult.” Because of that blood condition, pentobarbital would cause “bloody froth” in Pike’s lungs.
“This is death by drowning in one’s own blood,” the lawsuit states.
Pentobarbital and the new protocol have caused controversy following the August 2025 execution of Byron Black. Black had an implanted defibrillator, and his attorney Kelley Henry said he was “tortured” during his execution.
“Oh, it’s hurting so bad,” Black groaned, according to witnesses.
Like Pike, Black challenged the protocol, earning a temporary injunction from a trial court; however, the Supreme Court of Tennessee reversed the ruling and chastised Chancellor Russell T. Perkins, saying he overstepped his authority by modifying a Supreme Court execution order.
“When the trial court directed [the state] to alter Mr. Black’s method of execution based on his as-applied challenge to the protocol,” the opinion read, “the court exceeded its authority by effectively modifying and placing conditions upon this Court’s unconditional execution order.”
A challenge to the state’s death penalty protocol requires that the plaintiff provide a feasible alternative method of execution. The lawsuit argues that, among other reasons for this requirement’s unconstitutionality, doing so would violate Pike’s Buddhist beliefs, which prohibit “participating in any process leading to [one’s] own death.” However, the lawsuit does propose an alternative: a butterfly needle inserted by trained medical professionals.
Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820. She seeks a permanent injunction against the new protocol, a contingency plan with life-saving medical procedures if the execution fails, an elimination of the 14-day pre-execution isolation period and equal protection based on two precedent cases that are still being litigated — in which Terry King and Donald Middlebrooks received stays of their executions so they could challenge previous protocols.
The Banner, along with other news organizations, is currently a plaintiff in a Chancery Court lawsuit seeking additional media access to executions. Both sides await Chancellor I’Ashea Myles’ ruling on a temporary injunction. You can read that complaint here.
“We filed this lawsuit for three reasons,” say Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen, Pike’s lawyers and members of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee. “First, given Christa’s unique medical conditions, we have serious reservations about the State of Tennessee’s ability to prevent a tortuous execution. Second, the State’s protocol fails to make any contingency plans for when things go wrong. Finally, requiring a prisoner to select electrocution to avoid being isolated in the final two weeks of their life is particularly cruel and arbitrary — especially for a prisoner like Christa, who was forced to live in solitary confinement for over 25 years and suffers from severe mental illness.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.
