How the botched execution of Christa Pike unfolded, by someone in the room

Christa Pike was scheduled to be executed. But after two injections, she kept breathing. She made snoring sounds, she talked, she said her arm was hurting.

Doctors are now trying to save her life.

She was critically ill and receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived two attempts by Tennessee to execute her with lethal injections, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Her ⁠botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the second this year in Tennessee, highlights the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections and finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.

Pike said as her scheduled lethal injection began that she was at peace.

Strapped to a gurney around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Pike, who was allowed to give a final statement, said she was leaving the world with love.

“I’m ready to be free,” she said. This is a happy day.”

Pike, now 50, was 18 when she committed the murder and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

But instead she survived two doses of the pentobarbital meant to kill her. She left the prison in an ambulance instead of a hearse.

An Associated Press journalist was among those who witnessed her failed execution. She was already strapped to the gurney, with IV inserted in her arm, when prison officials raised the curtain to the execution room at 7:27 p.m.

Her spiritual adviser was standing beside the gurney near her head. He spoke to her. They sang a song. The lyrics were not audible, but included repeating the phrase — “I love you.” The spiritual adviser stroked her forehead.

Minutes ticked by. She raised her head and looked around; she smiled. Then she said her arm was hurting and asked a prison official in the room if it was supposed to feel that way.

Ten minutes in, at 7:37 p.m., she sighed, the IV in her arm fed from a control room adjacent to the death chamber, separated by a ledge. At 7:41 p.m., a rock or paper weight about the size of a golf ball was placed on the ledge. Prison officials have not confirmed what it means, but its placement appeared to coincide with a direction in the protocol that says after the drugs are administered, a five-minute countdown begins until the curtain is closed.

At 7:46 p.m., officials closed the curtain, blocking the witnesses’ view of the death chamber. Pike’s spiritual adviser left the chamber and sat briefly with her attorney in the media witness room.

The curtain rose again three minutes later. The Tennessee lethal injection protocol calls for a second round of pentobarbital if the inmate is not deceased after the first round.

An hour-plus of what sounded like snoring

Her spiritual adviser returned to the chamber and stood beside Pike with his hands folded. Pike appeared to begin to lose consciousness at some point and started making a sound like snoring. She continued to do so for the next hour, a sign that she was alive long after she was expected to be dead.

Her head raised slightly off the gurney and turned to the side at about 7:56 p.m. She kept breathing.

Officials closed the curtain again at 8:06 p.m.

For the next 40 minutes, Pike could be heard from behind the curtain. She sounded like she was snoring, a rhythmic, regular breathing pattern.

Inside the prison, Pike’s attorney, Randy Spivey, later told the media that at about 8:22 p.m. he demanded access to a telephone to contact other lawyers on the team. He said he demanded the execution be halted and that life-saving medical care be given to Pike. He said he received confirmation at about 8:50 p.m. that an ambulance was on the way.

At 8:53 p.m., an announcement came: “Will witnesses please exit the area.” The media was escorted out, and a prison spokesperson said she had no information to provide about what had happened.

Fire trucks and ambulances arrived in front of the prison at around 9:14 p.m. Pike’s attorneys later issued a statement that she had been taken to a hospital and was being treated, though they did not know the specifics of her condition. On Thursday afternoon, they said she was in critical condition receiving medical care.

Governor orders a review

The Tennessee Department of Correction issued a statement saying the department followed protocol.

“The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening,” the agency wrote. “Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility.”

The agency has not said what went wrong. It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to complete an execution, though in the other case, officials couldn’t find a suitable vein for an IV line so the drugs weren’t administered.

Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review and postponed another execution scheduled for later this year, calling what happened in the death chamber “deeply disturbing.”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, had traveled to Nashville to see the sentence carried out.

“I didn’t get justice for my daughter,” Martinez told the AP by telephone.

“I watched the whole thing. She was awake,” Martinez said. “She was moving her head, moving her feet. She was trying to sit up. Didn’t work the first time they gave her a shot. It didn’t work the second time so she’s in the hospital and alive.”

“This isn’t justice for Colleen.”

Many states have backup execution plans, but failures still happen

Long before Christa Pike was brought into Tennessee’s execution chamber, prison leaders reviewed and approved a backup plan detailing exactly what to do if the first attempt at lethal injection failed.

But the backup plan also failed, and Thursday.

Twenty-seven states have capital punishment, and they vary widely in how they administer the death penalty and just how much of that lethal process they keep hidden from public view, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, a clearinghouse for information on U.S. executions.

Some states have extensive backup plans. Others don’t.

Tennessee falls somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to contingency plans, with two redundancies built into its execution process.

First, inmates are supposed to have two intravenous lines placed. Thus, if the first IV site fails, the execution team can switch to the second one. A physician on the execution team can even insert a central line — which typically involves making an incision in a major blood vessel in the groin, neck or armpit in order to thread a catheter into the body to a spot near the heart — if needed.

Intravenous lines can fail for several reasons, like a needle and catheter not being properly placed in a vein or wiggling out of place — or a vein rupturing and letting blood and IV fluid leak into tissue surrounding the IV site.

Tennessee also allows for a second 100 mg dose of pentobarbital to be administered if the condemned person is still alive five minutes after the first dose was given.

Tennessee prison officials gave Pike a second dose, but it’s not clear if they used the primary IV site or the backup site to do so.

Little backup in Alabama, a lot in Idaho

Alabama has a three-drug lethal injection protocol. It allows for a backup dose of the first drug, the sedative midazolam, to be given if the inmate isn’t unconscious from the first dose. But the protocol doesn’t include additional instructions for what to do if the condemned person is still alive after the first dose of the next two drugs, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

Idaho, meanwhile, has contingency plans for nearly every step of the execution process, with backup IV sites, allowances for administering a central IV line, and up to three full doses of any of the state’s four approved lethal injection drug cocktails.

Idaho recently made firing squad its primary execution method, though it has yet to kill someone by that method. Still, the state’s firing squad protocol also has a backup plan, with the prison director able to order a second volley of shots within a two-minute time span if she determines it is necessary to complete the execution.

Despite contingency plans, executions are still botched at times

Idaho called off the execution of Thomas Eugene Creech in 2024 after execution team members could not place a viable IV after eight attempts.

Tennessee also called off an execution earlier this year after failing to find a suitable vein for a secondary IV line.

In 2014, Arizona executioners injected Joseph Rudolph Wood with a lethal combination of drugs 15 times during the nearly two hours it took him to die. He gasped more than 600 times while he lay on the table.

Witnesses keep the public informed when executions succeed or fail

In many ways, executions are shrouded in secrecy. The identity of execution team members, the details about where and how lethal drugs are procured, and in some states even what happens in the death chamber is hidden from public view.

But executions, like all criminal sentences, are conducted by the state on behalf of its citizens, so it’s critical that members of the public understand exactly how that ultimate punishment is carried out.

Most death penalty states allow a few members of the media to witness executions on behalf of the public. Once the execution is over, those news representatives typically take part in a news conference, sharing exactly what they saw and heard with the rest of the world.

Access to executions varies by state, and limitations often lead to court battles

Only two states, Indiana and Wyoming, explicitly ban members of the press from witnessing executions. Wyoming, with no one currently on death row, hasn’t carried out an execution since 1992, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

A coalition of news organizations including The Associated Press sued Indiana last year for a seat in the witness room, but in June a federal appellate court upheld the state’s law barring media access.

In Idaho, media witnesses are allowed to watch as a condemned person is placed on a gurney, has IVs inserted and is put to death. Yet AP and other news organizations have sued for increased access. The news organizations asked a judge to allow them to watch via closed-circuit monitors as the drugs are pushed into the IV lines, which is currently shielded from public view in a private room beside the death chamber.

A federal judge ordered the state to provide that access, citing a 9th U.S. Circuit Court ruling that said the public should be able to view all critical parts of an execution via the press. But the state appealed, and the appellate court hasn’t yet ruled on the matter.