Tennessee Couldn't Kill Christa Pike. It Should Stop Executing Anyone.

After two doses of pentobarbital failed, life without parole is the one sentence Tennessee can be sure it can carry out.

Christa Pike was still breathing after two separate doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday night, Sept. 30, when the witnesses were taken out of the room, a media witness told PBS NewsHour. By Friday she was unconscious, critically ill and on a ventilator, with injuries to both arms, her lawyers told ABC7.

The state shouldn't try again. Gov. Bill Lee should commute her sentence to life in prison, and Tennessee should stop executing people altogether, not out of tenderness for a woman convicted of murder but because the state just showed it can't reliably do the thing it sentenced her to. The second dose settles it for me. Nobody plans a second dose. It's what a state reaches for after the first one has already failed.

I wasn't among the witnesses, so my verdict rests on what the people who were there have said publicly. Catherine Sweeney, a media witness from the Nashville station WPLN, told PBS NewsHour, "They went through two rounds and she was still breathing at the end." She said Pike lifted her head and said a spot was "burning and hurting."

Tori Gessner of WKRN, another witness, told ABC7 that Pike could still be heard snoring at 8:53 p.m. local time, when the witnesses were walked out. Her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen of Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, have since asked Lee to commute the sentence.

Look at how that single Wednesday went. A federal appeals court had put the execution on hold. Earlier that day, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay in a 6-3 vote, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissenting, ABC7 reported. The court cleared the way in the afternoon. By nightfall, the state had used two rounds of the drug and hadn't finished what the court allowed it to start.

Lee has now ordered a third-party review and a temporary halt to executions, according to ABC7 and PBS. A review can tell Tennessee what went wrong in one room on one night. It can't promise the next room goes differently, and the state was confident enough on Wednesday afternoon to go ahead with this one.

The Guardian's editorial board argued on Oct. 1 that the cruelty is built into the death penalty and that Pike's botched execution only made it visible. I'd make the narrower case, because it's harder to wave away. A supporter of capital punishment can still look at Wednesday and see a state that couldn't carry one out.

The strongest case against me starts with Colleen Slemmer. She was 19 when she was killed in 1995, and Pike, her 18-year-old classmate, was convicted of her murder, PBS NewsHour reported. PBS called the killing gruesome. A death sentence, three decades since the crime and a family owed an ending don't evaporate because the state fumbled one night. Pike surviving says nothing about her guilt, and it shouldn't buy mercy she didn't earn.

Every word of that holds, and it's why my argument was never that Pike has suffered enough. That version would make her punishment about the needle instead of the killing. Life without parole keeps her in prison until she dies. It punishes her fully, and it's a sentence Tennessee knows how to deliver every single day without reaching for a second dose.

I started out arguing about what the state did to Pike and ended up thinking about what it did to Slemmer. On Oct. 1, Pike's Wikipedia page was the most-read on English Wikipedia, with 4.3 million views. A 31-year-old killing became, overnight, a story about a drug that didn't work.

The commutation request is on Lee's desk. He's already stopped the executions to figure out what went wrong; signing it would give Christa Pike the one sentence Tennessee can be sure it'll finish.

Source: npr.org.

Source: npr.org, retrieved October 3, 2026.