Christa Pike survived her execution. What happened?

By Dakin Andone, Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — After a flurry of eleventh-hour litigation, Christa Pike was strapped to a gurney Wednesday night, set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years.

But after being injected with two ostensibly lethal doses of pentobarbital, Pike was still alive, snoring loudly as journalists selected to witness the execution glanced at one another, wondering what was happening.

“None of it was normal,” said Catherine Sweeney, a reporter for WPLN. “I covered all the executions last year, and most of the ones this year. We haven’t seen anything like it. It went really poorly.”

Pike is in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care, her legal team said Thursday afternoon. Attorney Randy Spivey called for the governor to commute her sentence, saying she had endured punishment “greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”

The failure to execute Pike – who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer – raises serious questions about what went wrong during the execution and what happens next.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, announced he would call off the state’s last remaining execution this year while a third-party review takes place to “determine what exactly occurred” in Pike’s case, according to The Associated Press.

“The Governor has appropriately called for an investigation,” the office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement. “We need to know what happened.”

It’s the second such order of Lee’s tenure: He similarly paused executions in 2022, when he said he learned the proper procedure for testing the lethal drugs had not been followed.

This was just the latest blunder by a state that has pushed ahead with executions after several years of troubles, including a failed execution attempt earlier this year. In the wake of the failure, critics of the death penalty called for a halt to executions, not just in Tennessee but in the 27 states that still practice the death penalty.

“The state of Tennessee has shown the world it cannot be trusted to implement capital punishment in a way that preserves human dignity and the rule of law,” Laura Porter, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, said in a statement. “This has to stop now.”

Tennessee is not alone. Multiple states have struggled with lethal injections in recent years, giving rise to novel methods, like executions by nitrogen gas, and the return of old methods, such as the firing squad.

The central issue with lethal injection is it’s a “Frankenstein version” of a medical procedure, said Corinna Barrett Lain, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law and author of the 2025 book “Secrets of the Killing State: the Untold Story of Lethal Injection.”

These executions generally feature drugs of questionable quality, nonmedical personnel administering the drugs and patients with notoriously weak veins, Lain said. Lethal injection’s “botch rate” is twice that of other methods, she said.

“It has all of the delicacy and need for accuracy of the medical model, but then it’s been warped to suit the executioner’s needs,” she said. “It’s a recipe for disaster from the start.”

In a statement, Pike’s legal team pointed to several possible issues.

“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” attorneys Spivey and Kelly Gleason said in a statement. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”

A timeline of the attempted execution

Pike was initially scheduled to be executed on Wednesday morning, but last-minute legal appeals delayed the execution to later in the day.

Tori Gessner of WKRN, one of the media witnesses, provided a detailed timeline of Pike’s execution.

The witnesses were taken into the witness chamber at 6:41 p.m., she said. The blinds that look into the execution chamber were opened at 7:26 p.m., and Pike then gave her final statement, she said. At 7:34 p.m., Pike said her arm felt like it was about to burst and she appeared to be talking, breathing, moaning and snoring over the following minutes, Gessner said.

The blinds to the room were closed at 7:46 p.m. and then reopened at 7:49 p.m., Gessner said. Pike was snoring with her mouth open at this point. The blinds then went down at 8:05 p.m., and remained closed until the witnesses were escorted out of the area at 8:53 p.m., Gessner said.

Pike’s attorneys offered several other details Thursday. The execution team spent an hour trying to establish an IV line and used at least seven needles in her left arm, Spivey said.

“I’m haunted by last night,” he said. “What I saw last night is not something that should ever, ever happen again.”

Another attorney, Stephen Ferrell, said no one on her legal team has seen her and he declined to speculate about what she is experiencing.

Pike’s biggest fear “was not a fear of dying. It was a fear of prolonged, painful, traumatic death,” Ferrell said. “That’s what happened, minus the death.”

The media witnesses said they had little sense of what exactly was happening.

“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened, happened behind a closed curtain when Christa Pike was still alive,” said Steven Hale, a reporter for the Nashville Banner.

John North, a journalist for WBIR, echoed that sentiment.

“Obviously, we have a lot of questions about what we saw and what we did not see, because there were moments when the blinds were down for us and there were moments when the blinds were up for us,” he said.

“It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go,” he added.

State says it followed protocol

The Tennessee Department of Correction said it acted according to its protocol throughout the failed execution.

“The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” the department said in a statement. “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.”

Tennessee’s lethal injection execution protocol is laid out in a 44-page document created by the Department of Correction, according to a copy obtained by the Death Penalty Information Center. CNN has requested a copy of the protocol from the Tennessee Department of Correction.

The step-by-step protocol is used to “ensure the humane and constitutional execution of inmates sentenced to death” and prohibits officials from straying from the procedure.

“There will be no deviation from the Protocol except by order of the Commissioner,” the protocol states.

The protocol approves only a one-drug method of lethal injection, specifically pentobarbital, a barbiturate that can cause death. The protocol states 100 ml of a 50 mg/ml solution of pentobarbital (a total of 5 grams) shall be checked to verify its contents and expiration dates 30 days before a scheduled execution.

The document lays out procedures leading up to, during and after the execution. Personnel prepare the primary 100 ml dose of pentobarbital solution in syringes, as well as a backup set “if the inmate is not deceased,” the protocol states.

There is no protocol for what happens if that second set does not work.

There is only limited precedent for what comes next. While it’s not uncommon to have a “botched” execution – when something differs from official protocol – it’s exceedingly rare for an execution to simply fail, said Austin Sarat, an Amherst College professor and author of several books on the death penalty and lethal injection.

In a case 80 years ago, Willie Francis survived the electric chair in Louisiana, only to be executed on a second attempt.

“So we’re in kind of unprecedented territory with Pike in the sense of she survived her execution,” he said. Sarat considers Pike to be “the first person to survive a lethal injection where the drugs reached her.”

Additional information has been added to this story.

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CNN’s Meg Tirrell and Meridith Edwards contributed to this report.