Tennessee Governor Halts Executions for Rest of Year After Christa Pike Survives Lethal Injection

State orders independent review after the only woman on its death row remained alive following two doses of pentobarbital

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended executions in the state for the remainder of the year after officials failed to put Christa Gail Pike to death. Tennessee officials were unable to execute Pike on Wednesday for a 1995 murder despite administering two doses of a lethal drug, and a death penalty expert described it as an unprecedented failure.

Pike, 50, was alive and snoring loudly after the attempted lethal injection and was taken from the prison by ambulance, according to her attorneys. Her lawyers with the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender said she was being treated at a nearby hospital and that they had not been told of her condition.

In a statement, Governor Lee said that carrying out a lawful sentence is among the state’s gravest responsibilities and that Tennesseans expect it to be done in a manner “that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective.” He said he had ordered a comprehensive third-party review to establish exactly what happened, and that the state’s one remaining scheduled execution would not take place this year. Under the schedule set by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Gary Wayne Sutton had been due to be executed on December 3, 2026.

The Tennessee Department of Correction maintained that it had followed every step of the state’s established execution protocol, which was approved by the office of Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

The attempted execution followed a last-minute legal battle. An appeals court had earlier ordered a delay to examine whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered at her sentencing. The US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, then granted Tennessee’s request to lift that stay, allowing the state to proceed before the death warrant expired at midnight. The court’s conservative majority gave no explanation, while its three liberal justices dissented, saying Pike’s claims merited closer scrutiny.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture killing of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Job Corps centre in Knoxville; Pike was 18 at the time. Had the execution succeeded, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Executions of women are rare in the United States: since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, 18 women have been executed, about 1% of the total, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

This was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to complete an execution. In May, officials abandoned the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers after executioners spent more than an hour trying unsuccessfully to place an IV line. Governor Lee had previously paused executions in 2022 after an investigation found prison officials were breaching their own lethal injection rules.