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Two IV lines were set in her arms, and a saline flow began as the execution team readied their lethal drugs. At 7:26 PM, the curtains to an adjacent room opened, revealing Pike to the gathered witnesses, including several journalists, her lawyers, and Colleen Slemmer's mother. The warden asked Pike if she had any final statement. "I do", she replied. "I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love", she said. "I have love for all the people out there who hate me as much as the ones who love me. I am at peace. I'm ready to be free. This is a happy day."
At that point, with her final statement completed, the execution was set to proceed. As Tennessee's protocol would dictate, two syringes, each filled with 2.5 grams of pentobarbital, would be injected down the IV line into Christa Pike's arm. Within a few minutes, if all went according to plan, Christa Pike would drift peacefully off to sleep, gradually stop breathing, and would die.
But that is not what happened next.
At 7:34, Pike abruptly sat up. "My arm feels like it's about to burst open", she said. "One spot is really throbbing. Is that normal?" As the minutes passed, she continued to twitch and yawn, and kick at the sheet covering her lower body, but Christa Pike remained alive and breathing.
Tennessee's protocol calls for a backup injection to be administered in the event an inmate survives the first dose. It was quickly injected, but Christa Pike still did not die. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she began to snore, lifting her head up every now and then, for the next hour. Her heart continued to beat, and she continued to draw an increasingly ragged, squeaky breath. At 8:53, the witnesses to the execution were dismissed, with Christa Pike still very much still alive, and the execution was called off.
Before I proceed further, I think I should discuss Christa Pike's crime which landed her on death row, because by all measures it was absolutely appalling. In 1995, she, her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and their friend Shadolla Peterson, lured their 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into an isolated area of Knoxville, TN, after Pike wrongly believed that Slemmer was trying to "steal" Tadaryl from her. Pike and Shipp tortured Slemmer for hours with a knife, slashing her over 300 times. When this failed to kill Colleen, Pike smashed her head in with a chunk of asphalt, then fished out a piece of the murdered woman's skull to keep as a souvenir.
For thirty years, the Slemmer family waited for the date when Pike would face justice for her crimes. Colleen Slemmer's mother raised money from donors to be able to afford the trip from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. The death sentence was repeatedly stayed and then reauthorized in the hours prior to the night of September 30. And now, after all that, the state of Tennessee has botched the execution to an unprecedented degree. Never before in history has an inmate survived a lethal injection, and so we are truly in uncharted waters as to what happens next.
As of the time of this writing, it is unclear what Christa Pike's condition is. She is currently at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville, receiving "life-saving medical treatment", but it is still unclear whether Christa Pike will ultimately survive. She had five times the lethal dose of pentobarbital in her system, and there is no known antidote for an overdose. It is likely that Pike - if she survives - will be left with permanent brain damage, if not in a vegetative state, and under those circumstances it is unlikely, if not impossible, that the state of Tennessee will ever try to execute her again. And one thing above all is abundantly clear: The state of Tennessee truly, colossally screwed up.
I have made no secret about my support for the death penalty. I truly believe it is an appropriate consequence for the most heinous and depraved murders. But what happened last night in Tennessee is absolutely unacceptable and is only the latest in a long line of catastrophic bunglings that the state has made while trying to use lethal injection. In 2022, Tennessee paused executions for four years after discovering that the drugs used in lethal injections had serious impurities, and just earlier this year the execution of Tony Carruthers was called off after an hour and a half of medical technicians struggling to find a useable vein. While we don't yet know all of the facts, it seems pretty likely that something similar occurred here. The burning that Christa Pike complained about seems to indicate that her vein blew out, or that the IV lines set in her arm somehow became dislodged. And given Tennessee's poor track record involving executions by lethal injection - as well as the fact that pentobarbital has been routinely used hundreds of times in other states with no comparable botch - one would be hard-pressed to attribute what happened last night to anything else but wanton human error.
A few years ago, I wrote about Tennessee's resumption of the electric chair for the 2018 execution of Edmund Zagorski. While I had concerns over the protocol that was being used - as the designer of the chair himself did - Zagorski's execution - and the executions of four other inmates after him that chose the electric chair - went off without any problems. If Tennessee really wishes to continue using the death penalty - and personally I hope that they do, because there are a lot of other heinous murderers on death row awaiting execution - they must take every measure to ensure that another such catastrophe never happens again.
What happened last night was nothing short of a disaster. It was an absolute, undignified
circus that made a mockery of Tennessee's justice system at the expense of the citizens of Tennessee, Colleen Slemmer, Colleen Slemmer's family, and, yes - as much as I hate to say it - even Christa Pike herself. The promise of justice finally being done was dangled in front of Colleen Slemmer's mother, and then cruelly torn away at the last minute thanks to the incompetence and lack of care by the people charged with providing it. And that is unacceptable.
The state of Tennessee has shown itself to be thoroughly untrustworthy to keep using lethal injection. And while a years-long moratorium is bound to follow this debacle, I hope that the state legislature will take this time to reevaluate its death penalty system, pass legislation to make the electric chair the default method, and put a stop to this insanity.
Colleen Slemmer deserved far better than what we gave her.
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