Christa Pike was critically ill and receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday, hours after she survived two attempts by the state of Tennessee to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the United States.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Wednesday’s botched execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution — the second in Tennessee this year — underscores the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections and in finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.

“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Ms. Pike’s lawyers and a witness to the execution attempt, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now.”

Her lawyers renewed their calls for her sentence to be commuted to life in prison after what they described as “chemical torture.” Tennessee has suspended all executions for the remainder of the year while it investigates the incident.

Failed Executions

Botched lethal injections are not rare, but they usually involve difficulties at the first step: setting intravenous lines in the condemned prisoner’s body. Pike’s case is unusual in that prison officials appeared to succeed in injecting the drugs into her with two syringes, causing her right arm to “turn purple” and her skin to blister at the injection sites, Spivey said.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit group in Washington, she appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her body.

“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin Maher, the center’s director, said in a statement.

After the second injection, Pike said her arm hurt and felt like it was “about to explode,” her lawyers said — suggesting to them that the execution drugs had gone into her arm tissue rather than directly into her bloodstream.

Pike, who would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries, has a blood condition and had feared that something would go wrong with a lethal injection, her lawyers said. They unsuccessfully petitioned the state to consider alternative methods, such as death by hanging or firing squad.

Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who denied Pike’s clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.

“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee told reporters. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”

‘Kind’ With Her Executioners

Pike’s lawyers shared new details about her time in the execution chamber, saying her request to prison officials for an all-female execution team appeared to have been honored.

During the roughly hour-long process of setting up the intravenous lines, Pike offered the executioners guidance on how they might place the needle to gain better access to her veins, Spivey said.

“Miss Pike was kind and she was cooperative and she was at peace the whole time,” Spivey said. “She was ready.”

Even after the first dose was injected, Pike continued speaking with her spiritual adviser and her executioners, wishing them “loving kindness,” Spivey said.

Drug Procurement and Global Context

Because pharmaceutical companies are forbidden by European law from selling drugs for use in executions, US prison systems typically rely on small, lightly regulated compounding pharmacies in procurement processes that are shrouded in secrecy. Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. It was unclear where the state procured the drugs for Wednesday’s failed execution — information Pike’s lawyers say was also withheld from them.

Most countries in the world, and 23 US, have abolished the death penalty, and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said Pike’s case showed the rest of the country should follow suit.

“The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel,” Türk said in a statement.

The 1995 Murder

Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area, where they tortured and killed her. Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder. — Reuters