Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row prisoner who survived a lethal injection on Sept. 30, says she has been in pain every day since. In a statement dictated to her lawyers from a prison infirmary and released Friday, Oct. 30, she blamed the failed execution on “incompetence.”
It is the first time Pike, 50, has spoken publicly since the attempt. Her words arrive as the state reviews what went wrong, a new prisons chief takes over, and her lawyers press Gov. Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison.
What Christa Pike said in her statement
Pike said she walked into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville expecting to die. “I had made my peace,” she said, according to ABC News, which published long passages from the statement.
She said she woke up in a hospital “confused and in pain” and had “not contemplated life beyond that night.”
Her description of the month since was blunt. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” she said. “And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
She also said: “I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” according to the Associated Press, via PBS NewsHour.
Pike said she continues “to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured.” She thanked the medical workers who treated her and ended on uncertainty. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next,” she said.
What happened on Sept. 30
Pike faces execution for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at a job-training center in Knoxville. The AP reports that Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed Slemmer. She became one of the youngest women sentenced to death.
On the night of the execution, witnesses said the curtain opened at 7:27 p.m. By 8:26 p.m., officials had administered a second dose of the sedative pentobarbital, FOX 4 reported, citing AP and media witnesses. Pike was still breathing when officials cut the chamber’s microphone at 8:53 p.m. She was then taken to a hospital by ambulance, her lawyers said.
Shortly after the first dose, Pike said her arm was burning and asked whether that was normal, NPR reported. Her lawyers say execution staff used at least seven needles in her left arm alone.
She spent her first days in the hospital unconscious and on a ventilator. Her lawyers said she was awake and speaking by Oct. 7. The hospital discharged her back to prison on Oct. 10. She is now in the infirmary at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville.
Attorney Stephen Ferrell of Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee told ABC News she has “a lot of burns on her arms” that are “healing very slowly.”
What ‘botched’ means in Pike’s case
The Death Penalty Information Center uses scholar Austin Sarat’s definition. A botched execution is “a breakdown in, or departure from, the ‘protocol'” for a method of execution. By Sarat’s count, about 7% of US lethal injections from 1890 to 2010 were botched, the highest rate of any method.
Pike’s case is unusual even by that measure. DPIC says she is the first person reported to survive after actually receiving lethal injection drugs. In most failed lethal injections, staff couldn’t set an IV line and stopped before giving any drug.
Why the drug didn’t work is still unexplained. Pike’s lawyers say problems with the IV lines likely sent the pentobarbital into her body tissue rather than her bloodstream, AP reported. Medical and lethal injection experts are now examining the same question, according to the AP.
The state has not accepted that account. In a statement issued at 11:15 p.m. that night, the Tennessee Department of Correction said it “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol.” It added that the drug “has consistently been effective,” and that the protocol “does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”
It was Tennessee’s second failed execution this year. In May, staff spent about an hour and a half trying to set a backup IV line for Tony Carruthers before stopping, according to DPIC.
The fallout in Nashville
Lee called off the state’s remaining 2026 execution and ordered a third-party review. Former US Attorney Ed Stanton is leading it, according to the AP. The state has released no findings or timeline.
Correction Commissioner Frank Strada announced on Oct. 3 that he would step down. He said he believed the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.” Pike’s lawyers said his exit “does nothing to help Christa now.”
On the same day Pike’s statement came out, Lee named Christopher Hansen interim commissioner. Hansen runs the department’s probation and parole operations. The announcement did not mention Pike or executions.
Colleen Slemmer’s family has its own view of the failure. Her mother, May Martinez, traveled to Nashville for the execution. “All I wanted was justice,” she told ABC affiliate WJXX, saying she believes the state failed her family.
The four legal tracks that decide what’s next
Pike’s death sentence still stands. What happens to it now runs through four separate processes, and none has a deadline yet.
The first is clemency. Her lawyers have asked Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole. Lee rejected her clemency petition before the execution. This week he said, “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
The second is a new execution date. Lee’s pause covers only the rest of 2026. A state lawyer, Assistant Attorney General John Ayers, said in court that any new date is a decision for the Tennessee Supreme Court, according to NPR.
The third is her lawsuit over the execution method, which a court reopened on Oct. 8. A day earlier, Davidson County Chancellor I’Ashea Myles ordered the state to keep everything from the execution room, including drugs, syringes, IV lines and officials’ messages. That evidence will be central to any claim about what went wrong.
The fourth concerns how she is held now. On Oct. 30, her lawyers filed an emergency motion in federal court, ABC News reported. It says the state is violating a 2024 settlement that allowed Pike social contact with other women in prison. Her lawyers say the state has kept her alone in the infirmary with no end date. Pike, who says she spent 28 years in solitary confinement, said the isolation is “a repeat of that condition.”
The federal court’s response to that motion is the next scheduled step. Stanton’s review, once released, will be the first official account of why two doses of pentobarbital did not work. For background on how Tennessee’s single-drug method works, see our explainer on lethal injection failures, and our earlier report on Pike’s recovery after leaving the hospital.
