Tennessee death row inmate survives lethal injection attempt

On September 30, 2026, the US state of Tennessee failed to carry out the execution of convicted killer Krista Gail Pike: more than half an hour after lethal drugs were administered, the woman was still alive and breathing, and she was subsequently taken to hospital. Pike was sentenced to death thirty years ago for the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

The 1995 murder

In January 1995, eighteen-year-old Krista Gail Pike and nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer met through the Job Corps education program in Knoxville, Tennessee, but the two never got along. Convinced that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Pike lured her rival, on the evening of January 12, to a secluded part of a university campus under the pretext of “talking things over,” together with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and another girl. Instead of talking, the three attacked Slemmer: Pike used a box cutter among other things and struck the victim with a piece of asphalt, while Shipp later admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s body.

The girl’s remains were found the next morning by a University of Tennessee employee, who at first thought he had come across a dead animal and only realized, on getting closer, that he was looking at the body of a young woman. One of the first police officers on the scene, John Terry Johnson, later testified in court that the body was so disfigured he could barely recognize it as human. Police tracked down Pike very quickly: she had been telling people what happened and showing acquaintances a piece of the victim’s skull that she had taken from the crime scene. She confessed during questioning, and a year later a jury found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to death.

Thirty years on death row

Krista Pike never denied guilt for killing Colleen Slemmer, but after decades on death row she maintained that it took her years to grasp the full weight of what she had done: “Today I am not the person I was at eighteen.” Wednesday’s failed execution was preceded by a legal battle: the change Pike had undergone behind bars became, in recent months, one of the defense’s main arguments against carrying out the sentence.

Her lawyers also pointed to her young age at the time of the crime and to childhood circumstances that the original jury had failed to properly weigh. According to her clemency petition, Pike was sexually abused as a child: she was raped by a neighbor at age eleven and raped again at seventeen. The state of Tennessee itself did not contest these basic claims of abuse in later legal proceedings.

The failed execution

According to witnesses to the execution, Krista Pike remained alive and continued breathing for dozens of minutes after two doses of pentobarbital were administered. Prison officials ultimately said the execution protocol allowed for no further steps, and the woman was taken to hospital. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee subsequently halted all executions scheduled in the state and ordered an independent investigation into what had happened. Robin Maher, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the case extraordinary even by US standards: executions had previously been halted over problems inserting an IV line, but never before because the condemned person survived the administration of the lethal drugs.

This year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that Pike’s lawyers at the time had failed to gather and present the court with sufficient evidence of her traumatic childhood, mental health problems, and the physical and sexual abuse she had suffered. According to the commission, neither of her two court-appointed defenders had any prior experience handling cases in which the defendant faced the death penalty. The question of the quality of that defense remained part of the case until the final hours: when the US Supreme Court on September 30 overturned a federal appeals court ruling that had halted the execution at the last moment, three liberal justices dissented. In a dissenting opinion, Sonia Sotomayor noted that Pike was still awaiting a ruling on her claim that her original lawyer had failed to present the jury with key mitigating evidence about the childhood sexual abuse she had suffered.

Her lawyers also pointed to Pike’s mental health: after her incarceration, she was diagnosed with, among other things, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Defense experts further suggested she might have suffered brain damage and argued that the combination of trauma, mental health problems and young age could have affected her ability to control her impulses and make rational decisions.

“As if Colleen never existed”

Pike herself described her state of mind at the time in similar terms: “I was a mentally ill eighteen-year-old child. It took me years to even grasp the severity of what I did,” her clemency petition states. “I took someone’s child, sister, friend. Today it sickens me to think I was capable of that.”

Pike’s age at the time of the crime became a separate point of contention. In 2005, the US Supreme Court banned the death penalty for crimes committed before the age of eighteen, citing, among other things, teenagers’ lesser maturity and greater impulsiveness — but Pike did not fall under that protection. “An eighteen-year-old’s brain is not yet an adult brain,” her lawyers argued after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected her clemency petition, saying that modern scientific evidence shows eighteen is too young an age to impose a death sentence.

The case was unusual for Tennessee as well: Pike is one of only eight people in the state’s modern history to be sentenced to death for a crime committed at eighteen. The sentences of the other seven were later commuted to prison terms. Her lawyer at the time later admitted that, in his opinion, at eighteen Pike had been less mature than his own ten-year-old daughter. Today, Pike is described as a fifty-year-old woman who regrets what she did, is undergoing treatment, and helps other condemned women in prison.

Colleen Slemmer’s family does not accept the arguments about Pike’s young age. Colleen was only nineteen when she died, but according to her mother, unlike Pike, the girl was never given the chance to grow up. “Most kids go through a lot, but that doesn’t make them go out and kill,” the mother said in response to the defense’s arguments about Pike’s traumatic childhood; thirty years on, she still insisted the execution was necessary. Mae Martinez has long pushed for the victim — her daughter — not to be forgotten in discussions about the killer: she describes Colleen as a calm, kind girl who loved roller skating and computers, helped children with disabilities, and volunteered at Special Olympics events. “It’s as if Colleen never existed,” she said this year, adding that for decades attention had been focused chiefly on Pike, her appeals, and her clemency petitions.

Martinez admitted that she still thinks about the last minutes of her daughter’s life: “Every time I think about it, I imagine Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run away. There isn’t a day or a minute that I don’t think about Colleen. The holidays are the worst.” To the defense’s argument that after her execution Pike would never again be able to sit down at a table with her family, for instance, Martinez had a simple answer: Colleen, too, would never be able to do that again — never go to the mall, go skating, or celebrate another birthday. That is why, on September 30, Martinez flew from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. “Maybe now we will finally get justice,” she said beforehand, acknowledging even then that Pike’s death would not bring her daughter back and would not necessarily end more than thirty years of grief.

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Source: seznamzpravy.cz