Christa Pike remains alive hours after Tennessee failed in executing her by lethal injection, her lawyers say

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Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is still alive following a failed execution attempt by state officials, her defense attorney confirmed Thursday.

The state attempted to execute Pike by lethal injection on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. However, neither the initial dose nor the backup dose of pentobarbital killed her, and she was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the procedure.

Pike was then transferred to an off-site hospital for medical treatment.

“Christa is alive right now,” defense attorney Randy Spivey said during a news conference. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment. But we know she is alive right now and receiving live-saving medical care.”

Spivey told reporters that the failed execution attempt amounted to “torture” and called for her death sentence to be commuted to life in prison.

Following the incident, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution along with the state’s only remaining execution scheduled for this year. Lee called the event “deeply disturbing” and ordered a full review into what went wrong.

An appeals court had initially issued a stay of execution an hour before the procedure was scheduled to start, but the decision was overturned hours later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of a woman when Pike was 18 years old. Had the lethal injection been completed, she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.

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