US death row inmate Christa Pike taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections, lawyer says

Tennessee, USA, October 1, 2026 — US death row inmate Christa Pike was taken to a hospital after remaining alive following two doses of lethal injection drugs during an attempted execution in Tennessee, according to her lawyer.

Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday over the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, whom she killed when she was 18. She would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.

According to Pike's lawyers, she remained conscious and breathing after two doses of pentobarbital were administered. Execution witnesses reported that she was still breathing more than 40 minutes after the second injection.

Her attorneys subsequently sought emergency court intervention to halt the execution. Pike was later transported to a hospital, where she was receiving medical treatment, according to her lawyers.

The execution had proceeded after the US Supreme Court overturned a temporary stay that had been issued earlier by a lower federal court. The earlier legal proceedings had involved claims concerning Pike's history of childhood abuse and the circumstances surrounding her death sentence.

Pike was convicted of the 1995 murder of Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Her lawyers have argued that evidence of severe childhood abuse and other mitigating circumstances was not adequately considered when she was sentenced to death.