Tennessee Death-Row Inmate Describes Ongoing Pain After Failed Execution

Christa Pike, a Tennessee death-row inmate who survived a failed lethal-injection attempt, says she remains in constant pain and struggles to speak a month after the execution was halted. In her first public statement since the September 30 procedure, Pike said she had expected to die but instead woke up confused in a hospital. “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” she said in a statement released on Friday.

She described pain in her body, arms, hands and throat, and said the suffering was also psychological and spiritual. “Healing is not the same as being okay,” she added, according to the BBC. Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital during the attempted execution and was initially hospitalised in critical condition.

Her lawyers said her arms were burned and blistered, and that she spent several days unconscious and on a ventilator. They also previously reported pneumonia, swelling and difficulty swallowing. Medical and lethal-injection experts have focused on whether a problem with the intravenous line caused the drug to enter tissue around the vein rather than the bloodstream.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has not explained why the procedure failed, although it has defended the method used. The state’s prison chief resigned after the incident. Governor Bill Lee ordered an investigation and postponed Tennessee’s other scheduled lethal injection for the year.

Asked this week whether Pike could face another execution attempt, Lee said he suspected her sentence would remain unchanged unless the courts determined otherwise. Pike’s legal team is asking him to reduce the sentence to life imprisonment. Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, her classmate at a job-training camp.

Pike was 18 at the time and committed the crime with her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Shipp was not sentenced to death because he was not legally an adult when the crime occurred and remains in prison. Pike acknowledged the continuing suffering of Slemmer’s family and said she remained grateful to medical workers who saved her life.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, attended the attempted execution and later described it as a “mess”, saying she believed the state owed her an apology because she had sought justice. Pike’s lawyers have spent decades appealing her case, and she is thought to be the only person to survive an execution attempt by lethal injection. Tennessee’s handling of the incident has prompted wider criticism: the BBC reported that more than a third of US executions in 2022 were botched or highly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The state is reviewing what happened, while Pike remains at the prison where she has spent about 30 years.