▶ Watch Video: Christa Pike’s attorneys push for commuted sentence after botched execution
Christa Pike, the death row inmate who last week survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her, remained hospitalized on a ventilator Monday, according to her attorney.
He said it was still unclear whether Pike would regain consciousness but urged the state to “take death off the table” by commuting her sentence, renewing an earlier request that the governor denied before her botched lethal injection.
“The least that could happen now is that we at least take death off the table and start looking for what the future could be for her,” attorney Steve Ferrell, of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, told “CBS Mornings.”
Ferrell added that he and the rest of Pike’s legal team were “certainly willing to discuss that with the governor, with whoever could make that decision.”
He told “CBS Mornings” that, although Pike was alive, her condition was considered critical and hospital staff continued to work to clear her body of the lethal drug pentobarbital. Even if she were to wake up, her future would be uncertain, he added.
“It may still be a long time before she’s able to participate in the legal process,” said Ferrell.
However, in hopes of preventing the possibility of Tennessee trying to execute Pike a second time, which is historically what has happened to inmates who’ve survived botched execution attempts, he said Pike’s legal team would push for the state to commute her death sentence to life in prison.
Pike has been incarcerated, largely in isolation, for three decades. She was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her former classmate, Colleen Slemmer, who was 19 when she was killed. Pike was 18, which made her the youngest person in the country’s modern death penalty era to be executed for a crime committed at 18, 19 or 20.
In the aftermath of Pike’s botched execution, Tennessee’s Department of Correction commissioner stepped down. Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Lee canceled the state’s next and last execution scheduled for this year and said he’d ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review” to determine what went wrong; Lee also went on to tell reporters at a briefing that “so far as we know, the Department of Correction followed exactly the protocol as outlined.”
Tennessee’s execution protocol has come under scrutiny before, and, in 2022, prompted the state to pause executions and investigate its lethal injection procedure. It resumed executions in 2025, carrying out three of them with a new lethal cocktail that consisted of a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than the combination of three it used formerly. But issues returned to Tennessee’s death chamber earlier this year, when correctional staff botched the planned execution of Tony Carruthers, also by lethal injection, after failing to establish an IV line.
At least seven U.S. inmates, including Carruthers, have survived failed lethal injections due to issues with their IV. But Pike’s survival was unprecedented, an expert told CBS News on Friday, because she had lived after actually receiving lethal drugs. Pike received two doses.
“That fact alone tells us that something went seriously wrong in the execution chamber,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It is an unprecedented event in the modern death penalty era.”
Because of Tennessee’s past mistakes while trying to put inmates to death, and because botched executions have happened increasingly often in other states, too, in recent years, leading to numerous accusations of torture against corrections officials, Pike had said she was “nervous about the process” in the days leading up to her execution date. Her attorneys had shared those concerns as well in their appeals filings, but, as Ferrell said in a statement after Pike’s injection failed: “All of this was predicted, and the court did nothing.”
