Pike is unconscious on a ventilator, her lawyers say. They filed an emergency motion alleging misplaced IV lines sent pentobarbital into her tissue instead of her bloodstream. The execution team spent about an hour on the attempt. By her attorney's count, they used at least seven needles on her left arm.
Catch up
On the evening of Sept. 30, the Supreme Court lifted a 2-1 6th Circuit stay issued about an hour before Christa Pike's Tennessee execution, with the three liberal justices dissenting. Pike, 50, then survived two pentobarbital doses after roughly an hour of IV attempts and was hospitalized in critical condition, and Tennessee canceled its last execution of 2026.
It is Tennessee's second failed execution this year, after Tony Carruthers in May (The Hill). The Death Penalty Information Center counts 64 botched U.S. executions since 1982, 51 of them lethal injections.