Christa Pike Transported to Hospital Following Two Failed Lethal Injection Attempts

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Christa Pike was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead, she is the state’s second death row inmate in a matter of months subjected to an unsuccessful attempt at a lethal injection.

On Wednesday night at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institute, following a day of legal wrangling, the state tried and failed to execute Pike for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike’s lawyers say she is still alive. 

After 8 p.m., the Knoxville Federal Public Defender’s Office confirmed that Pike had been given two doses of pentobarbital but that her heart hadn’t stopped. Their office immediately filed with both the federal district court and the Tennessee Supreme Court for a stay of execution and an order for Tennessee Department of Correction personnel to perform life-saving measures. At 9:15 p.m., an ambulance and a fire truck pulled up to the prison, lights flashing, interrupting the media-witness press conference. Assembled media sat in near silence for five minutes, watching and filming the ambulance. Several of the witnesses appeared shaken by what they’d seen.

“We have a lot of questions,” said John North, a media witness from Knoxville who attended Pike’s original trial, during the press conference. “And the Department of Correction has a lot of answers they need to provide the public.”

TDOC didn’t provide many answers. Just as they did after Tony Carruthers’ aborted execution in May, the agency declined to address the media after the fact. Unlike Carruthers’ execution, when Dr. Mark Walton Fowler could not establish a central line, the media witnesses said the curtains actually opened, and they saw Pike on a gurney. 

After 11 p.m., TDOC emailed the following statement: “The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office. 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.”

The botched execution occurred at the end of a long day at Riverbend. Around 9 a.m., an hour before the execution was originally scheduled, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit granted Pike a temporary stay. The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually vacated the stay around 5:50 p.m. in a 6-3 decision. But that flurry of legal filings, media witnesses said, was “just the tip of the iceberg” of an unprecedented day.

Media witnesses said they were allowed into the witness room at 6:26 p.m. After the curtains opened, Pike spoke what she thought would be her last words. 

Appeals Court Grants Last-Minute Stay of Christa Pike Execution

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years

“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life,” she said. “And that is with love.” Pike said she loved her detractors as much as she loved the people who were on her side. “I’m at peace, I’m ready to be free. This is a happy day,” she finished.

She repeated, with the Rev. Mikey Noechel, her spiritual adviser, “May you be at peace. May you be kind and gentle to yourself.” Later, she addressed the same message to the media witnesses, the “people behind the glass.”

Through the early stages of the process, witnesses were surprised by how much Pike talked. She and her spiritual adviser sang a song with the words “I love you.” Witnesses described the process as “out of sorts from the get-go.” 

For the most part, witnesses said, Pike labored but did not appear to be in distress. At one point, she said a spot on her arm felt like it was about to burst open. 

“Does it happen like that?” she asked Noechel.

“Relax,” he told her.

“I’m trying,” she said. She smiled and laughed, and a tear rolled down her right cheek.

At some point, Pike’s breathing became labored, then rhythmic. At 7:46 p.m., the curtain closed, and her spiritual adviser was asked to leave. At 7:49 p.m., the curtain lifted, and Noechel was allowed back into the room, suggesting that TDOC intended to try again. 

Soon after, Pike began to snore. Her snoring grew louder, and TDOC shut the curtain again at 8:05 p.m. Despite requests from witnesses, the curtain remained shut, with witnesses only able to listen to the process, until 8:53 p.m. At that point, the mic from the execution chamber cut out, and the warden asked the media witnesses to exit the room. Pike was still breathing. 

Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol calls for two syringes of 50 milliliters of pentobarbital, both of which Pike received. The protocol doesn’t address what happens when you give someone two doses, and they’re still alive. 

At 9:28 p.m., the ambulance left the prison, trailed by two white TDOC vans. 

“I am not afraid to die,” Pike wrote in a letter included as part of her clemency petition ahead of the execution. “I’m only nervous about the process.”

6th Circuit Steps in Early

Shortly before Pike was scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Pike an 11th-hour stay.

Pike’s appeals were mostly exhausted, including a late Tuesday denial by the U.S. Supreme Court and earlier decisions by the Tennessee Supreme Court and Gov. Bill Lee allowing the execution to move forward.

The motion Pike’s attorneys made was not a new habeas petition, but rather a contention that the state changed its position on her childhood abuse.

“She states that the State recently reversed its litigation position that she is a liar who fabricated sexual abuse,” the order reads. “Pike contends that the State’s concession of her history of child sexual abuse and rape ‘erodes the foundation’ of her state court proceedings.”

During the special master hearing in August, a lawyer from the state said: “The state does not dispute the terrible things that Miss Pike suffered. I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Miss Pike.”

The appellate court found that a stay was necessary to resolve the issue. Read the appellate court decision here.

Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s office immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which dissolved the stay at 5:50 p.m.

A Terrible Crime and the Aftermath

Pike, 50, was scheduled to be the first woman executed in the state of Tennessee in more than two centuries. She was sentenced to death for Slemmer’s murder in 1995, when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend named Shadolla Peterson tortured and killed Slemmer in the woods. Pike — who was convinced Slemmer, a Job Corps classmate, was trying to steal her boyfriend — was 18 at the time. Shipp was 17 and sentenced to life in prison, and Peterson turned state witness and avoided jail time. 

Police later found a fragment of Slemmer’s skull in Pike’s jacket pocket, and two other Job Corps classmates said Pike bragged to them about the murder and the souvenir.  

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In August, Special Master Judge Mark Ward announced he would not block Pike’s execution. Ward had been appointed to hear arguments about whether Pike’s medical and psychological conditions would cause a torturous death, violating the Eighth Amendment right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment. At a three-day hearing, Pike’s attorneys also pointed to the sexual abuse and trauma she was subjected to as a child. She suffered from bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. After evaluating Pike, clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand described her case as “truly extreme.” In an amicus brief to the Tennessee Supreme Court, a group of experts said Pike’s execution could cause her to “feel and believe that she is being raped to death.”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Banner that her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics and helped children with disabilities at her school in Florida. She loved to build and take apart computers, and one of her favorite T-shirts read “computer geek.” Martinez made the shirt into a teddy bear, which she still has today. 

Over the years, Martinez said, the state of Tennessee has intermittently returned her daughter’s remains. Eventually, because of the memories of her daughter, Martinez and the rest of her family felt they had to leave town.

“I couldn’t take the area anymore,” she told the Banner. “There’s too many memories. The school, the skating rink, the movies, it’s just all there.” 

Despite fundraising efforts from a victim’s advocacy organization, Martinez and her husband didn’t have enough money for plane tickets to Nashville. But they made the 600-mile drive to witness Pike’s execution, she said, “so I can remember that she is gone and I don’t have to fear that she’s going to pop up somewhere.” 

This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.