Christa Pike, who survived two full doses of pentobarbital in Tennessee’s execution chamber on September 30, is awake and talking, and on Wednesday a Nashville judge ordered the state to preserve everything that was in the room when it tried to kill her.
What is established so far:
- Her lawyers thought she was brain dead. They believed it as of Monday evening and expected life support to be withdrawn Tuesday. Instead she regained consciousness Tuesday and asked, “Where am I and who are you?”
- She is badly hurt. Pneumonia, a blood clot in one arm, no ability to swallow, and what attorney Randy Spivey called “a lot of cognitive confusion.”
- The judge sided with her. Davidson County Chancellor I’Ashea Myles: “Anything that was in the room needs to be preserved, that includes waste.”
- The state would not say what comes next. Its lawyer declined to say whether Tennessee will seek a new death warrant.
Most coverage is treating Wednesday’s order as housekeeping about IV tubing. It is the opening move in the fight that actually matters, whether Tennessee gets a third try, and the precedent the state would reach for was written for a different failure. In the modern cases where a state went back for a second attempt, the lethal drugs never entered the prisoner’s body. Pike’s did. Both doses.
The Ruling Tennessee Would Need Says the Drugs Never Went In
Start with Ohio, because that is the case everyone cites. In 2009 an execution team spent two hours sticking Romell Broom with needles, at least 18 times by his count, and never found a vein that would hold. In 2016 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the state could try again, and the majority’s reasoning was narrow and specific: because no drug was ever introduced, the execution had never begun. “Because Broom’s life was never at risk since the drugs were not introduced,” Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger wrote, “we do not believe that it would shock the public’s conscience to allow the state to carry out Broom’s execution.” Broom died in prison in 2020 before Ohio could try again. Alabama then ran the same logic twice: Kenneth Smith and Alan Miller both survived lethal injection attempts in 2022 in which staff could not establish IV lines, and Alabama killed both men with nitrogen gas in 2024.
Pike sits outside every one of those facts. Witnesses watched the curtain rise at 7:27 p.m. and heard her final words, “I’m ready to be free. This is a happy day.” Then the state gave her its first dose of pentobarbital and, when that did not kill her, a second. By about 7:56 she was snoring. When the chamber microphone was cut more than an hour into the attempt, she was still snoring.
That leaves Tennessee with one older precedent. In 1946 Louisiana’s portable electric chair failed to kill 17-year-old Willie Francis, and in 1947 the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a second attempt was allowed because an “accident, with no suggestion of malevolence” had stopped the first. Louisiana electrocuted him that May. The whole argument turns on that word, accident, which is why the fight over evidence comes first. The Ohio dissent saw it a decade ago. “If the state cannot explain why the Broom execution went wrong,” Justice Judi French wrote, “then the state cannot guarantee that the outcome will be different next time.”
In court on Wednesday, the Department of Correction said the IV lines may have been cut and left in Pike’s body before the ambulance took her, so it cannot preserve what it no longer holds. Myles ordered the department to claw back anything already thrown away and to keep the needles, the drugs, the packaging labels, the recordings and the staff text messages, Signal chats included.
Tennessee Had Its Warning in May
This is the part the live blogs skip. Pike’s chamber was not the state’s first failure this year; it was the second in five months.
On May 21, Tennessee called off Tony Carruthers’ execution after staff spent more than an hour failing to place the backup IV line its own protocol requires. Carruthers got a one-year reprieve. The physician in that room, Dr. Mark Fowler, had acknowledged in an October 2025 deposition that he had not placed a central line in more than a decade. In August, Fowler confirmed he would oversee Pike’s execution, even as her lawyers were warning the court about a lifelong blood disorder and veins that are hard to access.
Governor Bill Lee did not pause executions after Carruthers. He denied Pike’s clemency petition the week of her date. Only after the second failure did he order a third-party review and halt executions for the rest of 2026. The department’s line has not moved: it says it followed every step of its protocol and that the drug has been consistently effective. If both of those are true, the protocol itself is the problem.
Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is resigning at the end of the month, saying it is “in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward.” He came to Tennessee three years ago from Arizona, where several executions on his watch ran into trouble of their own. Tennessee hired him in 2023 partly to overhaul an execution process Lee had already halted once, in 2022. It got two failures in one year.
What We Think Tennessee Owes Now
None of this softens what Pike did. In January 1995, at 18, she tortured and killed Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps center. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has now relived her daughter’s death twice in a week. She called the failed execution “a mess” and said Tennessee, the governor included, “owe me big time.” She is right.
We think Lee should commute Pike’s sentence to life without parole, which her lawyers asked for again this week, and he should do it now rather than after his own review reports back.
The reason is about the state. A death sentence carries an implied promise that the government can carry out a killing lawfully and competently. Tennessee broke that promise twice in five months, kept the same doctor between the two attempts, and sent a lawyer to court on Wednesday who would not say whether it wants another try. The Francis “accident” defense gets thinner each time the same accident repeats. A state that cannot yet explain what happened inside its own chamber has no business asking a court for a third attempt.
Can Tennessee try to execute Christa Pike again?
Nothing in current law bars it outright. The Supreme Court allowed a second attempt in the 1947 Willie Francis case, and Ohio’s top court cleared one for Romell Broom in 2016. Lee’s pause covers only the rest of 2026, and the state’s lawyer declined on Wednesday to say whether Tennessee will seek a new death warrant. Pike’s case differs from Broom’s because she actually received the drugs, which would put any new attempt on less settled legal ground.
What did the judge order on Wednesday?
Chancellor I’Ashea Myles granted Pike’s emergency motion to preserve evidence from the execution attempt: needles, drugs, IV lines, packaging, photos, audio and video, medical records, time logs and staff messages, including Signal chats. Myles has not yet ruled on whether Pike’s shackles come off in the hospital.
Who is Christa Pike?
Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville and was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. Had the September 30 execution worked, she would have been the first woman Tennessee executed in more than 200 years. We covered the case, and her teenage co-defendant’s eligibility for parole, the day before the date.
The evidence order saves the needles.
Lee still has to decide whether anyone picks them up again.
Pike asked who everyone was when she woke. Tennessee should be able to answer what happened to her before it asks for anything else.