Tennessee governor Bill Lee has halted the state’s remaining executions for the rest of the year after officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death yesterday.
Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.
She had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Governor Lee said that he was halting the one remaining execution for the rest of 2026 and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution. In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.
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