Anesthesiologist who advised Christa Pike’s defense speaks out against lethal injection
Anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot joins Bill Hemmer to examine the legal consequences of Christa Pike’s botched execution in Tennessee, after a judge ordered state officials to preserve evidence from the procedure. Zivot, who advised Pike’s legal team, discusses the problems involving the lethal injection drugs used in the failed attempt. Pike remains on death row.
The physician present during Christa Pike’s failed execution says an improperly positioned IV delivered the lethal medication into the tissue of her arms rather than directly into her bloodstream. Dr. Mark Fowler also acknowledged that the execution team should have halted the procedure when Pike reported severe pain.
Fowler, who served as the attending physician during Pike’s Sept. 30 execution attempt, provided a rare firsthand description of the medical crisis in an interview with New York Magazine published Friday.
Pike, 50, remained alive after being given two doses of pentobarbital. She was hospitalized for several days before eventually regaining consciousness.
Fowler said he realized the process was not unfolding normally when Pike’s execution continued for roughly 45 minutes. By the time he entered the execution chamber, she was still alive and gasping.
An execution gurney is shown alongside a Tennessee Department of Correction booking photo of death row inmate Christa Pike, whose attorneys filed an emergency motion seeking to preserve evidence after the state’s failed execution attempt. (Greg Smith/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images ; Tennessee Department of Correction via AP)
At first, Fowler said, he wondered whether Pike was simply responding more slowly than anticipated to the medication. He decided to allow additional time for the drugs to take effect.
After another 30 minutes, however, Fowler feared Pike might survive with permanent brain damage. He eventually determined that she was comatose, before a deputy commissioner directed officials to end the execution.
Fowler ordered that Pike be given oxygen, and she was transported by ambulance to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
According to Fowler, the IV intended to deliver the pentobarbital had not been correctly placed inside Pike’s veins.
Instead, he told New York Magazine, the line was sending the medication into “the subcutaneous tissue” of her arms.
Convicted killer Christa Gail Pike listens to proceedings on April 2008 in Knox County Criminal Court in a bid for a new trial in the 1995 killing of fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer. (USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect)
Pike’s attorneys had previously told the court that she experienced intense pain during the procedure and warned those in the chamber: “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.”
“They should have stopped and reassessed, and they didn’t,” Fowler said in the New York Magazine interview.
Fowler’s account emerged shortly after Pike’s attorneys released her own statement describing the lasting effects of the failed execution. Pike said she continues to live with constant pain and has difficulty speaking.
“My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts,” Pike said Friday. “I still struggle to speak.”
She also said she was “deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position.”
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The controversy surrounding Fowler’s role in Pike’s failed execution is not the first time his work in an execution has faced scrutiny.
Christa Gail Pike appears remotely from Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation for her hearing in Knox County Criminal Court in Knoxville, Tenn., on Aug. 11, 2026. (USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect)
New York Magazine reported that Fowler also participated in the 2025 execution of Byron Black and was involved in Tony Carruthers’ unsuccessful execution attempt in May.
In the Carruthers case, Fowler attempted to place an IV near Carruthers’ clavicle after paramedics were unable to establish traditional IV access. Fowler told the magazine he ultimately stopped because he lacked adequate anesthetic and the procedure was becoming too painful for Carruthers.
“I’m not an evil, vicious person. I’m not unscrupulous. I’m not uncaring, and I’m not incompetent,” Fowler said.
Still, Fowler said Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol needs to change.
He called for fewer handoffs among execution team members and said those responsible for placing IV lines should remain in position to monitor them as the lethal drugs are administered.
“The people who place the IV lines should thereafter be observant about what’s happening with them as the medicine goes in,” Fowler said.
A split image shows Christa Pike at her murder trial in 1995, left, and Colleen Slemmer, the young woman she was convicted of torturing and killing, on the right. (Reuters)
Following the failed execution, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee halted the state’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent review of what went wrong.
Lee said last week that Pike remains incarcerated under state law and signaled that her death sentence is unlikely to change.
“I suspect her sentence will be the same as it was before unless determined otherwise by the courts,” Lee said.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow participant in a federal Job Corps program in Knoxville.
Pike’s attorneys have called on Lee to commute her death sentence to life without parole.
News Media has reached out to Fowler and the Tennessee Department of Correction seeking additional comment and an interview but has not received a response.