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 B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 2 October 2026
THE SECOND DOSE
Tennessee pauses executions, not Christa Pike's death sentence, after failing twice to carry it out.
As it ran on the front
Tennessee's capacity to carry out a death sentence on schedule died Wednesday night at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, of a double dose of pentobarbital that did not work. It was one day old, born the moment the Supreme Court declined to hear Christa Pike's clemency appeal on Tuesday, September 29, and dead before Thursday's papers went to press. It is survived by Pike herself, 50, who was still breathing — and by all accounts, still snoring — forty minutes after the second injection should have killed her. It is preceded in death by two centuries of Tennessee not executing a woman at all; Pike was to be the first.
The protocol had one job. Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, had said on the record that she was "at peace," that she was "not afraid to die" and "only nervous about the process." The process is the part that failed. A doctor interviewed by a Nashville television station suggested the IV line could have been placed incorrectly — not a finding, a suggestion, offered the day after the state could not explain why its own drug did not do what it was built to do.…
…(cont) Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, called the outcome "deeply disturbing" and suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year, which is the government's way of apologizing to a machine instead of a person. An independent inquiry has been ordered into the hardware. No inquiry has been ordered into the sentence.
United Nations human rights experts have asked Tennessee not to try a third time. Pike's lawyers, and lawyers who are not hers, have asked the governor to commute the sentence outright — to do by signature what the needle could not do by chemistry. Deborah Denno, who teaches law at Fordham, was brought on television to explain what happens next, which is the honest answer: nobody yet knows.
What died here was not a person. It was a schedule, a streak, a state's quiet confidence that it could do this cleanly and on time. That confidence had survived two hundred years without being tested on a woman. It did not survive one Wednesday night on the only one it tried.
In lieu of flowers, the state is asked to finish the inquiry before it finishes the sentence.
“They didn't pause her sentence, they paused the assembly line. The one time the machine jams, they review the machine, not the decision to turn it on in the first place. The needle failed, so now they're auditing the needle — not whether she needed to die at all.”
“Look, the drug failed, the conviction didn't — those are two completely separate questions and conflating them is exactly what the other side wants. This was a logistics problem, an IV-placement problem, nothing more. Did I just call a botched execution a logistics problem? That tracks, actually — no, strike that.”
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…
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…
Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital in a botched Tennessee execution, and her lawyers now urge Gov. Bill Lee to commute her death sentence.
Tennessee gave death row inmate Christa Pike two doses of a lethal drug, but somehow she survived. NBC News’ Jesse Kirsch reports.
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.
Christa Pike was taken to a hospital after the failed attempts to put her to death in Tennessee on Wednesday night. Her condition was not known and officials have not said how she survived the deadly doses of pentobarbital.
· Supreme Court declines Christa Pike's clemency appeal, with Tennessee set to execute first woman in 200 years from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Tennessee prepares to execute the first woman in over 200 years from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Tennessee inmate survived two lethal injections, her lawyer said in motion to halt execution from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· ‘It was a mess’: Tennessee fails to execute inmate after 2 lethal injections from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Tennessee inmate survived two lethal injections, her lawyer says in motion to halt execution from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Lone woman death row inmate Christa Pike says she’s ‘at peace’ ahead of execution — as Tennessee gov. denies last-ditch bid for clemency from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Christa Pike: What to know about the case of Tennessee death row inmate from the morgue, 28 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.