Tennessee gave Christa Pike every dose its execution protocol allows on Wednesday night, and she did not die. Executioners at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution injected two 50-milliliter syringes of pentobarbital into the 50-year-old. Witnesses heard her snoring. Her lawyers said her heart had not stopped. The Department of Correction moved her to an off-site medical facility, and her lawyers say nobody has told them her condition. Then the protocol ran out of steps.
Gov. Bill Lee ordered a "comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred" and said the state's one remaining 2026 execution, set for Dec. 3, will not go ahead this year. The people of Tennessee, he said, expect a sentence carried out "in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective."
The Department of Correction said it "followed every step" of the protocol, that the chemical "has consistently been effective," and that the protocol "does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening."
Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. She was 18 in 1995 when she and her boyfriend stabbed and beat 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a Knoxville job-training center, to death.
Twice this year, Tennessee has failed to complete an execution. So what did the executioners do in the hour and a half between the first syringe and the moment the warden cut the microphone?
