Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, but the lethal injection failed after two doses of pentobarbital. According to Pike’s attorneys, she remained conscious and was audibly snoring. She was later taken by ambulance to a hospital. Pike, now 50, was convicted in 1996 along with co-defendants Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson.
The execution had already been complicated by a legal back-and-forth. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay roughly an hour before the scheduled execution, and the state was fighting to lift it when the injection was administered. The result leaves open questions about what comes next legally for Pike and what this means for capital punishment protocols in Tennessee.
For Slemmer’s family, the failed execution extends a wait that has already lasted more than three decades. Her niece, Seeley, said the process should never have stretched this long, and her grandmother, May Martinez, has lived through every appeal. Slemmer was just 19 when she was killed on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.
What do you think? Should a botched execution change how a sentence is carried out, or should the state get another attempt? We want to hear from you.
