The Davidson County Chancery Court in Nashville directed Tennessee prison officials to preserve all evidence tied to last week’s botched Christa Pike execution, including log books, medical waste, and communications by personnel involved in the attempt, according to the court order.
Judge I’Ashea Myles said that everything in the execution chamber “needs to be preserved and maintained.” The judge also granted a request from Pike’s attorneys for liberal access to their client, instructing prison officials to respond within two hours to lawyers’ requests for in-person visits.
Speaking outside the courthouse, Luke P. Ihnen, an assistant federal defender in Knoxville, called the ruling “a first step of many to preserve and enforce Christa’s constitutional rights after this unprecedented botched execution.”
The hearing followed the Sept. 30 attempt to execute Pike by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Officials administered two doses of pentobarbital. Minutes after the first dose, Pike reported burning pain in her arm and asked if it was supposed to feel that way, then requested that officials try higher on her shoulder. She was later hospitalized in critical condition.
Pike’s lawyers said she was unconscious for days following the attempt, but that she has since regained consciousness, is speaking, and remains under critical medical care. Post-conviction attorney Randy Spivey described Pike as “a survivor,” saying she had endured sexual abuse, multiple rapes, a suicide attempt at age 12, and now a failed execution. He said the outcome was foreseeable due to a medical condition that makes IV access difficult.
Spivey, who witnessed the attempt, said that after a second dose of pentobarbital, Pike fell unconscious but continued breathing and making sounds like choking, and that it “went on for so long.”
After the failed execution, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada resigned. Governor Bill Lee paused executions through the end of the year and ordered an independent review of the state’s capital punishment system. At Wednesday’s hearing, Assistant Attorney General John W. Ayers said decisions about whether or when to set a new execution date rest with the Tennessee Supreme Court. Ihnen said it would be “unconscionable” for the state to attempt to execute Pike again.
Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder committed at age 18. Prosecutors said Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. Shipp, a minor at the time, received life without parole. In a clemency petition filed last month, Pike’s lawyers asked that her sentence be commuted to life without parole, citing extensive childhood trauma. They said media coverage during the 1990s “Satanic Panic” amplified salacious elements and overlooked her youth, trauma, and mental illness, while noting that Shipp was the one fascinated by satanic imagery.
Debate intensifies after Christa Pike execution
Critics of capital punishment condemned the events. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in a statement that the failed attempt was the worst the organization has ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era.
The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, said Pike is the first person in the history of capital punishment to survive after being injected with lethal drugs.
In a clemency petition filed last month, Pike’s lawyers asked that her sentence be commuted to life without parole, citing extensive childhood trauma, a punishment that mirrors the outcome in Caleb Flynn sentenced to life without parole in Ohio murder.