Pike’s botched execution renews death penalty scrutiny

Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike is renewing scrutiny over how states carry out the death penalty and raising questions about what legal recourse exists when that protocol goes awry.

The attempt mirrors recent failures in other states, where inmates and their lawyers have argued in court that such errors amount to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

“What happened here gives attorneys and courts both within and outside of Tennessee a new factual example that they’re certainly going to consider when evaluating any reliability of these procedures and any implications under the Eighth Amendment,” said Paul Lucas, an associate professor of criminal justice at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death a year after confessing to the brutal 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Jobs Corps classmate, at an abandoned steam plant in Knoxville.

Pike was set to be executed by lethal injection Wednesday morning, but it was delayed for hours following a last-minute stay by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That was ultimately lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court over the dissent of the three liberal justices.

The state’s attempt to execute her that night went disastrously. Witnesses in the death chamber reported Pike was still alive and snoring after being administered two syringes of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital.

Pike’s case is one of many within the past decade in which executioners either struggled to find a vein or the drugs didn’t work as expected, leading inmates to need additional doses or endure minutes of severe pain before the effects took hold.

“I think there’s been an assumption that pentobarbital protocols comply with the Constitution,” said Bo King, a capital postconviction attorney based in North Carolina who’s represented dozens of clients on death row and witnessed five executions.

“That is being challenged by botches like we saw with Ms. Pike,” he said, also pointing to another Tennessee case from last year in which an inmate complained that it was “hurting so bad” minutes after being injected with the drug.

Fourteen states and the federal government currently use a single-drug lethal injection protocol that most commonly relies on an overdose of pentobarbital, according to the Death Penalty Information Center . The barbiturate acts as a sedative that, when taken in high enough doses, can suppress the nervous system to the point of coma, cardiovascular collapse and death.

But it’s not always effective. The Biden administration stopped using the drug after a Justice Department review noted concerns that it may cause “unnecessary pain and suffering.” President Trump reversed that decision when he returned to office, reauthorizing its use in federal executions.

Pike was taken to the hospital about two hours after doses were administered. The state that had just failed to execute her was now responsible for facilitating life-saving care. She remained in critical condition as of Friday, according to her lawyers.

The state’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, has paused executions through the end of the year and ordered an independent, third-party review of what happened.

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” the governor said in a statement.

Pike’s lawyers want any further attempts to execute her off the table for good.

“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,” attorney Randy Spivey said during a press conference. “The governor must commute Christa’s sentence now.”

Their reprieve argument hinges on the idea that while the Constitution does not guarantee a painless execution, it does forbid “superadded” pain or terror in carrying out a death sentence. That standard has been repeatedly upheld and used by the Supreme Court to evaluate various challenges to state execution methods in the modern era.

In the landmark 2008 case of Baze v. Rees, the majority found that an execution method is only unconstitutional if it presents a “substantial” or “objectively intolerable” risk of serious harm and there is a feasible, readily available alternative that would significantly reduce that risk.

The high court adopted similar logic in rejecting challenges to Oklahoma’s and Missouri’s lethal injection protocols in 2015 and 2018, respectively.

Because the bar to prove cruel and unusual punishment is so high, legal experts say that challenges often turn on the specifics of how an execution is carried out.

Lucas suggested that is why the outcome of the review in Pike’s case will be critical in determining whether the state may ultimately try again.

“The question would be whether, knowing what Tennessee knows now from its first attempt, subjecting Ms. Pike to another execution, is it going to be under the same or similar procedures?” Lucas said. “That is what creates the unconstitutional risk of severe pain.”

Attorneys also face another complication when litigating postconviction claims in court: The capital punishment process in most states is shrouded in secrecy.

“The secrecy statutes conceal the information about the drugs themselves, or the protocols … that the state wants to use in an execution,” King explained. “It’s difficult to assess whether there’s a constitutional problem, much less bring a constitutional challenge, without that very basic information about how the state proposes to execute your client.”

Still, the “superadded pain” defense has been successful before, at least temporarily.

In June, the Supreme Court blocked Alabama from executing convicted murderer Jeffery Lee by nitrogen gas after an appeals court found the method unconstitutionally cruel. The state ultimately moved forward with a different method, lethal injection, and put Lee to death last month.

Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, is not alone when it comes to botched executions. Tennessee also botched the execution of Tony Carruthers in May, and the Death Penalty Information Center estimates there have been at least 64 instances of botched executions across the U.S. since 1982.

Although the electric chair remains an available method in a handful of states, it has not been used since 2020.

“Every major method of execution has had at least one botch since 2025,” King said.

The rate is highest among lethal injections, and experts note that litigating those cases is difficult because courts don’t generally view isolated mishaps as standalone grounds for permanent reprieve from the death penalty.

Pike is believed to be the first person in modern history to have survived an execution attempt once the drugs were already administered, and that has put the issue in uncharted territory.

“With this real-world data point, we’re going to see more litigation coming through the courts, and the outcome of that, with what happened with Ms. Pike and, of course, Tennessee, will inform that,” he later added.

Lucas also noted that the uptick in lethal injection-related litigation coupled with difficulty obtaining the lethal drugs has pushed states to search for alternative methods.

Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — have authorized the use of a firing squad. South Carolina executed three men via that method last year, the only state to do so since 2010.

King represented all three of those men. Lawyers claimed a botched execution in one of those cases, arguing that Mikal Mahdi endured some suffering after the bullets that were intended to kill him immediately largely missed his heart. The state disputes that claim.

Those failures, he said, point to larger systemic issues that leave families on both sides hanging in the balance.

“A botched execution or protracted execution does nothing to ease the suffering of anyone involved,” King said. “It leaves everyone in this limbo of uncertainty and pain, and I have a hard time understanding how anyone is served by that.”