Two lethal doses, blown veins, a ventilator: Tennessee's botched execution puts the death penalty itself on trial

Tennessee set out to kill Christa Pike on Wednesday night. It failed — and the 50-year-old now lies unconscious, intubated and breathing through a ventilator in a Nashville-area hospital while doctors work to clear the lethal drug pentobarbital from her system. The first detailed account of what happened inside the death chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution came on Friday in an emergency court filing by Pike's lawyers, who are asking a Tennessee court to order the Department of Correction to preserve all evidence from the botched execution. "At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike's body," the filing says. Instead of stopping, the filing alleges, the executioners "administered another lethal dose of pentobarbital." Witnesses said Pike remained awake far longer than expected and was later heard "loudly snoring" before an ambulance rushed her to hospital. She arrived with both arms "swollen, burned, and blistered," her lawyers say, and as of Friday remained in critical condition. Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer when she was 18, had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries. Her lawyers had warned the state and the courts in advance that the execution team would struggle with intravenous access. The state pressed ahead anyway. It was Tennessee's second botched execution this year. Governor Bill Lee, who had earlier denied Pike clemency, has now halted all further executions in the state for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review. "After having endured solitary confinement for more than 20 years and a full attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty," her lawyer Randy Spivey said. The legal team is demanding that Lee commute her sentence. The victim's family is left with its own wound. Colleen Slemmer's mother May Martinez, who travelled to witness the execution, told local television the state owed her family "a big apology". "All I wanted was justice," she said. The Justice has long opposed the death penalty. This week Tennessee showed why: a state that cannot kill cleanly has no business killing at all.