Christa Pike says she has been in constant pain since Tennessee's failed execution

Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, broke her silence today, Oct. 30, one month to the day after the state tried and failed to execute her.

"There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain," Pike, 50, said in a statement dictated to her lawyers from the infirmary at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville. "My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak."

She added: "And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul."

What happened on Sept. 30

Pike received two doses of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. She did not die. A media witness noted she could be heard loudly snoring about an hour after the procedure began, and she was taken to a hospital by ambulance.

She was on a ventilator for the first few days and regained consciousness days later. Her lawyers say she developed pneumonia and a blood clot, could not swallow, and at first could not move her arms or hands. One attorney told reporters her hands "looked like if you were to blow up a surgical glove."

Pike returned to prison on Oct. 10.

The Death Penalty Information Center says she is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the U.S. in which the drug was actually administered. Earlier halted executions generally involved trouble finding a vein.

The IV problem

A court filing by Pike's lawyer says the execution team used about 10 needles and tried several IV sites on both arms. The filing also says the IV team warned that a vein might have "blown" during the procedure. Court documents cited by The Associated Press suggest her veins may have ruptured before the drug was injected.

Before she lost consciousness, her lawyers say, Pike complained that her arm felt as if it would burst and that "it burns." Medical and lethal injection experts have pointed to a possible problem with the IV line that let the drug pool in tissue instead of entering the bloodstream. That is an expert theory. The state has not said what went wrong.

Pike's statement

Pike said she walked into the chamber ready to die. "I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I'm deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position," she said.

She also said she thinks about the family of her victim, Colleen Slemmer, and "the terrible pain and loss they have endured."

"I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next," she said. She thanked the medical workers who saved her and the people who have written to her.

The crime

Slemmer was 19. Pike was 18 when she, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a friend, Marissa Barr, killed her in 1995 in a wooded area of the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. Court filings describe an attack with a meat cleaver and a box cutter lasting up to an hour. Slemmer had been a classmate at a job training program for low-income young people.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996. Shipp, who was a minor at the time, was spared the death penalty and remains in prison.

The state's response

Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review to "determine exactly what occurred." The state's prison chief has resigned. A judge has ordered the state to preserve all evidence connected to the attempt.

Pike's attorneys have asked Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison. Asked by reporters this week about a second attempt, the governor said: "I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts."

The politics are moving in more than one direction. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican running for governor, has called for Tennessee to drop lethal injection and make the electric chair its primary method.

Pike's friend Bethany Mann, a founder of Child Arise Tennessee, said she is in direct contact with Pike and declined to add to the statement, citing respect for Pike's privacy.

The cost of this failure is already on the books: a hospitalized inmate, a departed prison chief, a statewide pause and a court-ordered evidence hold. Whether the state can legally try again after a procedure that went this wrong is an open question for the courts.

Lee's independent review has no announced completion date. Executions are paused only through the end of 2026, so its findings and any court rulings on Pike's sentence will shape what Tennessee does when the pause lifts.