Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review of the state’s lethal injection process after the botched attempt to execute the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row.
Page A2From§Eachthe late evening edition — 1 October 2026
BOTCHED TWICE
Tennessee fails to execute inmate twice, then orders itself to investigate the method for a third attempt.
As it ran on the front
The filing under review this week is a death warrant, and the state cannot get it to work. Start at the top of the page. On September 29, the Washington Examiner reported that Tennessee was preparing to execute Christa Pike, 50, the first woman the state would put to death in over two hundred years, for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. A last-minute legal battle followed, and the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the execution to proceed. That is the whole of what the Court did — allowed it to proceed.
Wednesday night, Riverbend Maximum Security Institution carried out the sentence the Court had cleared. Two injections of pentobarbital went in, each one supposed by the protocol to be lethal on its own. Pike was still alive forty minutes later. A doctor consulted by WSMV in Nashville raised the possibility that an IV line had been placed wrong — not a drug failure, a plumbing failure. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital instead of a morgue, and as of this writing remains in critical condition.…
…(cont) Thursday, Governor Bill Lee called the outcome "deeply disturbing," which is the governor's word for his own state's execution chamber. All together now — read that clause slowly: the state investigating the state, to find out why the state's lethal injection did not kill.
By Thursday the United Nations' human rights experts had joined what Common Dreams called a growing chorus, and they did not ask for leniency on the underlying case. They asked Tennessee not to try a third time to kill the same woman with the same protocol the governor already does not trust enough to use again this year.
“You don't send a man back to fix the gas line after he's already blown up the kitchen twice — but here's a state doing a controlled two-run test on a human being, admitting the apparatus doesn't work, and still keeping the door open for a third pull. Call it what it is: they're not debating whether she should die, they're debugging the method, on her body, with a paid inquiry as the warranty claim. The stakes aren't abstract — it's forty minutes of a woman breathing on a gurney while the people who scheduled that are the same people grading their own homework.”
“Look, the Court cleared the legal process, the process is what matters here, not the — okay, not the outcome, obviously the outcome is the thing everyone's — the governor ordered a review, that's accountability, that's the system working. Did I just call a forty-minute failed execution "the system working"? That's not — strike that.”
Earlier in this story
- Three judges tell the administration no in two weeks: reinstate him, hand over the memo, let them in. By Mitch · the early evening edition, 1 October 2026
The receipts
Independent inquiry ordered after failed execution of Pike, who was convicted of 1994 murder Christa Pike: what we know so far about Tennessee woman’s failed execution Tennessee ’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes…
Christa Pike is receiving medical care after Tennessee failed to execute her by lethal injection Wednesday night. Deborah Denno, a professor of law at Fordham Law School, joins "The Daily Report" to break down what could happen next.
United Nations human rights experts on Thursday joined the growing chorus of people around the world outraged by Tennessee's two botched attempts to execute Christa Pike and called on the state to refrain from trying again to kill the 50-year-old woman. After a last-minute legal battle , the US Supreme Court allowed Tennessee to execute…
The death penalty is back center stage in national politics in the most macabre of circumstances. Christa Pike, 50, who admits to the gruesome 1995 murder of classmate Colleen Slemmer, is in critical condition in the hospital after Tennessee’s attempt to execute her Wednesday evening failed. The attempted execution had only proceeded at…
Also, the Supreme Court will review Trump’s migrant detention policy. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.
· Tennessee prepares to execute the first woman in over 200 years from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· The Supreme Court of the United States rules 5–4 to lift the block on four federal executions scheduled for July and August. Convicted murderer Daniel Lewis Lee, whose execution was scheduled for the from the morgue, 14 Jul 2020
· 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
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.