On Wednesday, September 30, the State of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike. It couldn't.
Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. After a morning stay from the Sixth Circuit and an evening reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, she was given two rounds of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
According to media witnesses and her lawyers' court filings, she stayed conscious, said her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and was still audibly snoring behind a closed curtain when reporters were walked out. Then the state put her in an ambulance. The Death Penalty Information Center says no one in the U.S. had ever survived after receiving the drugs before.
In this emergency episode:
The night, minute by minute, from the people who were in the room
The vein-access warnings Pike's lawyers raised in August, and the Attorney General calling them "speculation"
Tony Carruthers in May, Byron Black in 2025, and Tennessee's track record
Governor Bill Lee's demand that executions be "effective," and his second outside review since 2022
The state admitting, six weeks before her date, that Pike was abused as a child
Colleen Slemmer, her mother May Martinez, and thirty-one years of waiting
"What if it were your child?" Answered by parents who lost theirs and still opposed executing the killers
Why the state should never hold the power to kill its own citizens
Reality Check: the study estimating at least 4.1% of people sentenced to death are innocent, 203 death row exonerations since 1973, and what Tennesseans can demand from the Governor's review.
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