Christa Pike survived her execution attempt, but her attorney says the ordeal could leave lasting physical and cognitive effects.
“She’s still in the hospital on a ventilator, critically ill,” Pike’s attorney, Stephen Ferrell, told CNN on Oct. 4. “We don’t really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days.”
Ferrell said he has not spoken directly with Pike’s doctors. Instead, his legal team has received updates through her medical power of attorney while Pike’s hospital room remains under guard.
“If she recovers, she may not fully recover,” Ferrell told CNN. “And there may be issues about her competence.”
“We have had no discussions about this,” Ferrell added. “The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office so far has not given us any indications of what their intentions will be.”
A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Correction declined to comment.
Pike had spent more than 30 years on death row for the brutal 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She was scheduled to be executed Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, but survived two doses of a lethal-injection drug and was taken to a hospital, where she remains.
“We don’t know what her physical state will be,” Ferrell told the outlet. “But it is clear that she has endured a torturous attempt at executing her.”
The execution was nearly halted before it began. A federal appeals court issued a temporary stay that day to consider a legal challenge from Pike’s attorneys. The stay was lifted hours later, allowing the execution to proceed—although the procedure ultimately failed.
After Pike delivered her final statement—“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love”—witnesses said she began gasping, choking and snoring inside the execution chamber.
At one point, Pike said, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst.” She was later transported to the hospital.
Her attorneys filed an emergency motion seeking to stop the execution, arguing that the procedure was causing her “unnecessary agony and occurring in violation of [her] right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review of the failed execution and postponed the Dec. 3 execution of Gary Wayne Sutton.
The Tennessee Department of Correction, however, said it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
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The botched execution has intensified debate over how Tennessee carries out the death penalty.
“Gubernatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn has announced that she would try to use the electric chair,” Ferrell told CNN. “Which would require the Tennessee legislature to change the law.”
Ferrell is now asking Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life in prison, while acknowledging that no sentence could undo Slemmer’s killing.
“Nothing that anyone can do will bring back Colleen Slemmer,” Ferrell told CNN. “Nothing that anyone can do will make this right for her mother.”
He added, “I don’t think attempting another execution is going to bring justice.”
What Happened to Colleen Slemmer?
On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike, then 18, led 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a secluded area of the University of Tennessee campus, where she fatally beat her. Pike’s boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, and their friend, 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson, helped in the attack.
Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest while Pike took a piece of her skull, which she later described as a “souvenir.”
Slemmer was beaten so badly that a university employee who discovered her remains, initially believed they belonged to an animal, according to a 1995 Tennessee Supreme Court opinion.
Pike gave a full confession to police, saying that Slemmer had been “running her mouth” and that she wanted Pike’s boyfriend. Pike claimed she didn’t mean to kill Slemmer and only wanted to fight her.
During Pike’s trial, her lawyers argued that she suffered from mental illness during the time of the killing. However, in 1996, she was found guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
Shipp was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to prison, while Peterson received six years of probation.
In 2023, Pike called Slemmer’s murder “the worst mistake.”
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected,” she wrote in a letter to The Tennessean. “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think that someone as loving and compassionate as myself had the ability to commit such a crime.”