Christa Pike's attorney addresses if her execution request was granted following hospitalization
Christa Pike is in critical condition in a Tennessee hospital after surviving two lethal injections, and her legal team says there is little clarity on her outlook.
"We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment," attorney Randy Spivey told the New York Post on Thursday. "But we do know that she is alive right now."
Spivey was also asked whether the state honored the one wish Pike made before the procedure: that only women be present in the death chamber. "What I saw was consistent with that," he replied when asked if the execution team appeared to be all women.
Pike, 50, had asked for the arrangement because she was previously sexually abused and said being put to death by a man would be too traumatizing.
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Her lawyer Stephen Ferrell said: "That was her biggest fear as the victim of sexual abuse, that she would be pinned down, prodded, poked, cut."
What happened during Christa Pike's execution attempt?
Spivey said Pike was pinned down for around an hour while medical staff struggled to place two IV lines. "I counted at least seven needles used in her left arm alone, one of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her arm after an unsuccessful attempt," he said.
He added that Pike tried to help, repeatedly telling the team: "Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here, I think it will be okay." She even thanked them once the lines were in.
Ferrell said the drugs may have been injected into her arm muscle rather than a vein. Her lawyers had argued she had blown veins, and the Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed after a last-minute challenge.
After two doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday, Pike was still alive, according to her lawyers, and was taken to hospital by ambulance. Spivey said witnesses were kept in a dark room behind a closed curtain, and 'it was clear that Miss Pike was still breathing' minutes after the second dose. "No-one knew what was going on behind that curtain," he said.
What happens next after Christa Pike's botched execution?
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has paused all executions for the year and ordered an independent review, without saying who will lead it. "There are a lot of questions," he said.
"The people of our state deserve to have those questions answered, and that's what this investigation is for."
The pause overlaps with the planned 3 December execution of Gary Sutton. It is also the second failed attempt in Tennessee in 2026, after Tony Carruthers' execution in May was called off when staff could not find a vein and he was given a year's reprieve.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it 'followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol'.
Pike's lawyers are now urging the governor to commute her sentence, a request that was previously denied. Ferrell said: "We want to think this through and we want to make sure that Christa recovers and has some input in what she wants."
Pike was 18 when she and then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995, and she was sentenced to death in 1996. She would have been the first woman Tennessee executed in 200 years, and is now the first known death row inmate to survive an execution attempt.
Thomas Bamford