Christa Pike remains critical after failed execution in the US

The death sentence that survived two lethal injections in the U.S. state of Tennessee was still in critical condition today, unaware of its prognosis, one of its lawyers told CNN,

04/10/2026
by

Lusa

A missing execution, on Wednesday night, of Christa Pike, who would be the first woman executed in over 200 years in Tennessee, in southern United States, rekindled doubts about the application of the death penalty in the country.

“She remains hospitalized, under assisted ventilation and in critical condition. We do not really know his prognosis yet and we may not know for several days,” lawyer Stephen Ferrell said.

Stephen Ferrell needed that he has not yet been able to visit his 50-year-old client at the hospital, where doctors continue to try to eliminate from the body the two doses of pentobarbital that were administered to him.

The lawyer appealed to the governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, to take the time.

“ At the very least, the governor should commute Mrs. Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment”, he said, considering that the convict was subjected, as a result of the failed execution, to “serious mental and physical torture”.

The governor, who on Thursday ordered the suspension of executions in the state and the opening of an independent investigation to the failure of Christa Pike's execution, announced on Saturday that he had accepted the resignation of the head of the Tennessee prison administration (TDOC).

The prison administration stated to have strictly complied with the protocol adopted since the resumption of executions in the state in May 2025, after a three-year moratorium. At the time, the governor had decreed this moratorium due to flaws in checking the lethal solution administered to a convict.

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), an observatory specializing in the death penalty, denounced on Thursday “a flawed execution without parallel in the modern era”, stressing that Christa Pike is “the first person to survive the injection of lethal doses of substances used in executions”.

Christa Pike was sentenced to the death penalty for Colleen Slemmer's murder in 1995 when she was 18. His two accomplices, also teenagers at the time, escaped capital punishment.