Christa Pike is alive and conscious. That’s not a good thing. She should be dead. Pike was sentenced to death for brutally torturing and murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She should have been dead for days, but two botched lethal injection attempts led to her being rushed to the hospital, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee suspended the remaining execution this year. She’s not Little Debbie; Pike has to go.
We’re hearing stories of her recovery, as if she got into an automobile accident. I don’t care about that — when can we carry out this execution? Reportedly, she was not pleased the execution attempt was botched. The words “angry” and “confused” were said by her attorney (via NYT):
Christa Pike battling blood clot, pneumonia and unable to eat after botched execution, lawyer says https://t.co/hItU6Hm8JA
— New York Post (@nypost) October 7, 2026
Six days after being shot full of a drug meant to kill her, Christa Pike awoke in a Nashville hospital, shackled to a bed and in a room where she knew no one.
Ms. Pike’s lawyers had been told to expect life support to end because her brain was not functioning after the attempt on Sept. 30 to execute her for killing a classmate decades before. But now, she was awake and in a swirl of what one lawyer called a mix of anger and confusion.
Her condition, disclosed on Wednesday after a court hearing, remains severe. She has a blood clot in one arm and pneumonia, and had not eaten — she was unable to swallow when her lawyers saw her. She could not move her arms, and her hands had swollen to resemble inflated surgical gloves, said the lawyer, Randy Spivey.
“She woke up in a hospital surrounded by people she didn’t know with a tube down her throat,” Mr. Spivey said during a news conference. “We don’t know the toll all of this will take, but Christa is a survivor.”
Ms. Pike’s awareness and evolving condition heightened the stakes of a procedural hearing in Nashville on Wednesday. A judge said she would order Tennessee to preserve records and evidence tied to the execution attempt and to ensure Ms. Pike could communicate easily with her lawyers.
The hearing came as Tennessee grapples with the ethical and legal questions surrounding the case of Ms. Pike, 50, the first person to survive injection drugs that were supposed to be lethal. A lawyer with the office of the state’s attorney general told a judge on Wednesday that he could not say whether Tennessee would try again to end her life.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, who paused executions while an independent investigation is underway, has not responded to questions about whether he would grant Ms. Pike clemency. Her lawyers have pleaded for him to allow her to spend the rest of her life in prison, arguing that she has suffered enough at the hands of the state.
No clemency for Pike. Take time for the review, but get her ready for another lethal injection attempt.
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