Convicted killer Christa Pike was left critically ill, unconscious and on life support after Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers said Friday, providing the first detailed account of the injuries she sustained.
Hospital staff were working to save Pike's life and remove the drug pentobarbital from her system, her attorneys said in an emergency motion seeking a court order requiring the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve evidence from Wednesday night's botched execution.
Pike remained in critical condition, intubated and dependent on a mechanical ventilator to breathe, her lawyers said. Two doses of pentobarbital were administered intravenously at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital.
The bungled attempt to establish intravenous lines also left both of her arms "swollen, burned and blistered," apparently because pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeped into the tissue beneath her skin, according to the court filing.
The lawyers accused Department of Correction officials of disregarding prior warnings from Pike's doctors that pre-existing medical conditions, including small veins and a blood disorder called thrombocytosis, would make placing IV lines especially difficult.
"At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike's body," her lawyers said in a filing in the Chancery Court for Tennessee's 20th Judicial District.
Witnesses to the execution attempt could hear Pike "crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure," the filing said.
The filing provided the fullest picture yet of the medical consequences of an attempted execution that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said followed the state's established protocol.
It was the state's second botched execution this year, prompting Lee to halt any further attempts to carry out the death penalty for the rest of 2026. He also ordered an independent review of what went wrong.
Pike, 50, was convicted three decades ago of first-degree murder for her role in the torture and killing of 19-year-old vocational school classmate Colleen Slemmer at the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville in 1995, when Pike was 18.
She had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries and the only person in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment to be executed in the state for a crime committed as a teenager.
Pike's then-17-year-old boyfriend was tried as an adult and convicted of murder but received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A third schoolmate, who was 18 at the time and acted as a lookout for the other two, testified for the prosecution and received probation.
Lee earlier this week rejected a clemency petition seeking to commute Pike's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The petition argued for leniency, in part, based on her childhood history of severe neglect, sexual abuse that included two rapes and untreated mental illness.
The clemency petition also cited evidence that Pike's mother drank heavily during pregnancy, which the petition said contributed to impaired brain development that made it difficult for Pike to control her impulses.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an 11th-hour stay of execution issued earlier that day by a federal appeals court to allow more time to consider Pike's claim that her childhood trauma had not been properly considered during sentencing.
In their filing Friday, Pike's lawyers urged the state Chancery Court to order the preservation of evidence they said would show that state prison personnel violated her constitutional rights by subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment.
