Christa Pike’s lethal injection is booked for September 30. She may be the first woman Tennessee executes in 200 years.
Page A4From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 October 2026
TWICE BOTCHED
Tennessee's first execution of a woman in 200 years fails twice, leaving her alive to make history anyway.
As it ran on the front
Tennessee's position, going into Wednesday, was that this would be routine — the Supreme Court had cleared the way late that night for Christa Pike, convicted over thirty years ago of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in two hundred years, which is not, on reflection, the kind of thing that happens routinely.
It did not. At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the team gave Pike a first dose of pentobarbital — a lethal dose, by design, meaning it was supposed to end her life, which it did not do. Tori Gessner, a news anchor for ABC affiliate WKRN who witnessed the execution, said Pike told the room her arm felt like it was about to burst open, then smiled. The team gave a second dose. That one did not work either.…
…(cont) Catherine Sweeney, a health reporter for WPLN, reported that the state's protocol had no rule for what should happen if a dose failed a second time: the people who wrote it had prepared for one kind of failure, and gotten two. Forty minutes after the second injection, witnesses in the room described her snoring, exhaling loudly, gasping — still alive. She was taken to an off-site medical facility. She is still alive.
Only then did Governor Bill Lee halt the state's remaining executions for the year, the second botched execution in Tennessee in 2026 alone. The state arrived, this week, at the same conclusion Florida's governor reached in December 2006, after a prisoner named Ángel Nieves Díaz took 34 minutes to die of a botched lethal injection: that something was wrong with how the drug was being delivered. Florida got there off one bad execution. Tennessee needed two attempts, forty minutes, and a trip to the hospital with the inmate still breathing.
Before Wednesday, the official position was that the system was sound — a safe drug, an all-female team, a lawful sentence, each one checked and confirmed, which must be why it took two doses and forty minutes to confirm that none of it had been. The Department of Correction has not yet said what that explanation will be.
“They promised an all-female team and a drug the protocol called safe, then needed two doses and forty minutes to find out it wasn't — and they only stopped once reporters in the room heard her snoring. This is the same state that called this routine, the first woman they'd tried to put to death in two hundred years, like it was a ribbon-cutting. You don't get a pause after the second failure instead of the first unless the plan was to keep going until somebody with a notepad made them stop.”
“Look, the system worked exactly as the courts intended — the Supreme Court cleared it, the Department followed its own protocol to the letter. Sure, it took two doses and forty minutes and a trip to the hospital before anyone called a halt, but the protocol itself is sound, it's just missing a rule for what happens if it fails twice, which — did I just say the protocol has a hole in it? That's not — forget I said that.”
The receipts
Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike, the lone woman on its death row as planned Wednesday, after injecting her with a lethal drug, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
The botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on Wednesday night was met with disgust and outrage by death penalty opponents who have long argued that not only is murder by the state morally wrong, but the government's inability to carry out such punishments humanely has been shown time and time again to result in horrific human…
A decision by the US Supreme Court late Wednesday cleared the way for Christa Pike – a woman convicted of murder in Tennessee over 30 years ago and the only woman on the state's death row – to be given a lethal injection after hours of dramatic legal wrangling up and down the judicial system.
A woman on Tennessee’s death row is still alive after two attempts at lethal injections. It’s the second time this year that Tennessee has botched an execution and now all future ones have been halted by the state’s governor. NBC’s Jesse Kirsch reports for TODAY.
Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, three decades ago, survived Tennessee's effort to execute her by means of an unprecedented two lethal injections, prison officials said. This was the state's first attempted execution of a woman in 200 years. 'At one point … she said, "my arm feels like it's about to…
· United States district court judge Jeremy Fogel imposes a moratorium on lethal injections in California stating that they are unconstitutional. In an unrelated incident, the Governor of Florida Jeb Bu from the morgue, 15 Dec 2006
· The Supreme Court of the United States refuses to vacate a stay of execution issued by the Arkansas Supreme Court. Arkansas's highest court has also put on hold the execution of another inmate, Bruce from the morgue, 18 Apr 2017
· Lethal injection by all-female team slated for Tennessee’s 1st woman death row inmate in 200 years from the morgue, 26 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.