A picture taken on December 4, 2007 shows death row inmate Christa Pike entering a Knox County Criminal Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, US., obtained by Reuters on September 30, 2026.
Christa Pike, the woman who survived two execution attempts in Tennessee earlier this week, remains hospitalized in critical condition, where presumably medical staff is at work trying to keep her alive.
If she wakes from the coma she had entered, Tennessee officials want to start anew to inject lethal drugs into her seemingly too-small veins to kill her and carry out the state death warrant. Pike also is being treated for “significant injuries to both arms” sustained when two lethal injections of pentobarbital failed to kill her. If she dies, there will be no need to try again.
As we know by now, Tennessee tried to put Pike to death Wednesday night by lethal injection for a murder she committed when she was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
There is just a simple, if total disconnect in the actions. When the state missed – twice – with its lethal injections, at what point did Tennessee become subject of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment,” as barred by the Constitution? If we don’t know how to carry out an effective lethal injection on a 32-year Death Row inmate, would a few days make a difference to figure out how to do the job right.
Is anyone bothered by the idea that millions protest in the street to protect the unborn, but no one in official circles even thinks there is a question about keeping Pike artificially alive so that we can kill her all over again?
Legal, Medical and Moral Issues
Sure, there are legal issues here. Pike’s lawyers have told the state to preserve all its records on the botched execution attempts. As the details emerge – Pike was known to have small veins that might not handle the injection, the state had no emergency oxygen nearby if the execution attempt went south, that Pike apparently lay in the death chamber whimpering – the story just gets worse.
The execution process lasted more than two hours, allowing her lawyers time to file emergency legal papers to stay the process to no avail. Even then, “attorneys for the State of Tennessee argued that (the Department of Corrections) had no obligation to render life-saving care to Ms. Pike,” argued the lawyers.
Doctors were telling news reporters – not the state or the courts – that Pike’s condition was such that the pentobarbital was flowing into her arm instead of straight into her veins, making for an unusually painful, if ineffective, process.
In May, Tennessee was forced to call off the planned execution of Tony Carruthers, who killed three people in 1994, after the medical team failed to find a vein to insert the pentobarbital used under the new execution protocol
Pike was convicted in 1995 murder case with two other teenagers.
Generally, execution misses have made finding the supply of legally acceptable death injections more difficult, and there are newer procedures in place in some states other than Tennessee to require practice injections.
What’s Happened
Frank Strada, the prisons chief, resigned on Saturday, and Gov. Bill Lee announced an independent investigation into what went wrong. Strada had been in the job since 2023, moving from a top prison job in Arizona, where had overseen three problem-plagued executions.
Nevertheless, Marsha Blackburn, who is favored to replace Lee as governor in November, said the state would seek to kill Pike anew. She said she would follow recommendations for process changes, but not for Pike.
Capital punishment in Tennessee has been criticized since 2022, when Gov. Lee was forced to cancel an execution because the drugs had not been properly tested.
This summer, The Gallup Poll found that a slight majority — 52% of U.S. adults — consider the death penalty morally acceptable, hovering near historic five-decade lows. The Pew Research Center says about two-thirds of Americans (66%) favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 32% oppose it, marking an uptick compared to prior recent years.
Support for the death penalty is much higher among Republicans than Democrats, the opposite of, say, abortion law. Younger adults show significantly lower support. Only about 41% of adults aged 18 to 34 favor the death penalty, compared to higher approval among older generations.
Botched executions are not going to help any moral debate here. As a society, we are confused about who should live and who should die, with all the legal – and now medical – complications to make it more difficult to decide what is “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.
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