Last week, I was one of the seven media witnesses who observed Tennessee fail to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike, the first woman to face the death penalty in the state in almost 200 years.
From our previous reporting, each of us had an inkling that the lethal injection process might not go according to plan.
Pike’s attorneys had asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to allow her to be hanged instead, citing concerns that a platelet disorder and small veins would make the actual injection not only painful but ineffective.
And Tennessee had already botched an execution attempt in May, when healthcare workers failed to establish complete IV access into Tony Carruthers, who was sentenced to death after being convicted for his involvement in the kidnapping and murders of three people in 1994.
Update: Execution fallout in Tennessee
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said after the failed execution of Carruthers, who has maintained he is innocent, the state wouldn’t try again to kill him for at least a year. After Pike left the execution chamber in an ambulance on Sept. 30, Lee announced he would suspend lethal injections for the rest of the year.
The morning of Pike’s scheduled execution, I and the other media witnesses arrived at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville by 8:30 a.m. and waited to be ushered into the prison with nothing but our driver’s licenses in hand. The plan was to wait inside until Pike began her journey to the death chamber at 10 a.m.
But we didn’t make it that far.
Before the Department of Correction’s staffers began moving us away from the outdoor media tent and our belongings, the reporters’ phones all went off. A federal circuit court had stayed the execution. This was my fifth stint as a media witness to an execution, and I’d never seen a stay issued. We didn’t know what that would mean.
It turned out to mean waiting for nine hours at the prison, barred from leaving the grounds. We spent most of it in the boardroom where parole hearings take place.
Hours of waiting. Then, ‘It’s a go.’
Throughout the wait, the victim’s family often came up in conversation. In 1995, Pike, then 18 years old, killed Colleen Slemmer, who was 19. Slemmer’s family lives in Florida and traveled to Tennessee for the execution with money raised through crowdfunding. It’s unclear where they waited while the last-minute legal wrangling played out.
Sometime around 6 p.m., the prison system’s communications director, Dorinda Carter, told us: “It’s a go.”
Tennessee had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay, and it did. Carter read the ruling aloud to us.
For unknown reasons, it took another hour or so for the security team to usher us into the witness bay, an all-white cinderblock room with black pleather chairs in two rows and a big window overlooking the death chamber. A loudspeaker pipes sound into the room from the chamber when the microphones are on.
A black curtain hangs in front of the window inside the death chamber. Department of Correction workers open it once IV lines are inserted into the condemned prisoner.
The curtain is there to obscure the workers who place the IVs, in order to shield their identities as required by state law. That process is enshrined in the “Lethal Injection Execution Protocol,” which is the guidebook the Department of Correction writes for itself. There is no other regulation over executions in the state.
My employer, the Nashville public radio station WPLN, is a party in a lawsuit challenging the state’s concealment of the IV insertion. When executions are botched, it’s often due to something going wrong while IVs are placed — or with the subsequent step if IVs fail, placing a central line in a deeper vein through the chest, neck, or groin.
A lower court ruled in favor of WPLN and other media plaintiffs in January, but the state appealed the order, and it has been halted while higher courts consider the case.
The death chamber
The American Medical Association officially bars doctors from participating in executions, and many other health professionals also consider assisting an execution to be unethical.
Outside of prison staffers and the execution team, only the prisoner’s spiritual adviser and attorney are allowed in the room with the prisoner while the IVs are inserted. So generally, attorneys’ descriptions are the only account of the procedure.
Under normal circumstances, witnesses sit in the bay for 10 or 15 minutes with the curtain closed. That’s how long it tends to take for the IV team to place a line and start running saline, to prepare for the 5 grams of the sedative pentobarbital that will be pumped in to kill the prisoner.
Once the lines are set, the execution team enters an adjacent, concealed room. The IV lines run through the wall into that hidden chamber, from which the drugs are administered.
But at Pike’s execution, we sat in the bay for 45 minutes with the curtain closed and the microphone turned off.
Until Carruthers’ failed execution, the Department of Correction kept the lights off in the witness bay during the wait. Witnesses at his execution said they sat in a dark room for an hour and a half as the execution team tried and failed to place an IV line. This time, the prison kept the lights on.
The clock we use to give a minute-by-minute account is in the death chamber, so we can’t see it with the curtain closed. John North, a reporter with the television station WBIR in Knoxville, was the only witness wearing a watch. The rest of us asked him over and over what time it was.
After half an hour, it was clear the IV team must have been struggling.
We wondered whether Pike’s execution would unfold similarly to Carruthers’. That time, the governor called and ordered the execution halted before the curtain ever opened.
But at 7:27 p.m., we heard the curtain being drawn away.
We saw Pike in profile, lying on the gurney, facing the window for the other bay, where the victim’s family and prosecutors sit.
We saw Pike’s spiritual adviser, Mikey Noechel, who wore a wine-red sash over his suit. Together, they sang and talked about Buddhist teachings.
Under the state’s protocol, the spiritual adviser is allowed in the death chamber as the pentobarbital flow begins, though the attorneys are not.
There is no signal when the lethal drugs start flowing, but it’s assumed to begin after the prisoner delivers her final words. It’s typical for the spiritual adviser to offer prayers and other support, and for there to be a back-and-forth between the two.
Pike spoke.
“I just want to say that I’m going to leave this world the way I’ve spent most of my life, and that is with love,” she said.
She said that she had love for those who hate her, and that she was at peace with her death.
Moments later, Pike told Noechel her arm was burning. She said it was in one specific spot and asked corrections staff in the room whether that was normal.
Pentobarbital is alkaline, so it burns like drain cleaner if it touches skin. If the IV is administered correctly, that is unlikely to happen.
But Pike and Noechel chatted for what seemed a shocking amount of time. Prisoners tend to show signs of being sedated a few minutes in. Pike didn’t.
Something is wrong
The Tennessee Department of Correction uses an odd practice to announce the drugs have been fully administered. There’s a small, hinged door built into the wall between the concealed drug management room and the death chamber, with a platform beneath it.
Once the drugs have completely flowed through the IV, the staff open the door and place a rock on the platform. That initiates a five-minute waiting period, after which the curtain closes again to obscure a doctor, who enters the death chamber, checks the prisoner’s pulse, and certifies the death.
In each of the executions I’ve witnessed, the prisoners look unconscious long before the rock comes out, and in the minutes following they’re presumed dead.
The rock came out at 7:41 p.m. At 7:44 p.m., Pike was still speaking quietly to Noechel.
My jaw dropped. It was clear to me then that something was very wrong.
Once the five minutes are up and the curtain closes to conceal the doctor, who confirms the time of death, the spiritual adviser moves into the witness bay and stays there until everyone leaves the facility.
But after Noechel entered the witness bay, staff came in and ordered him back into the death chamber. There was only one reason to do so: They were trying again.
The curtain re-opened.
The state’s protocol dictates that, as a backup plan, prison staff can run a second round of pentobarbital. According to a statement from the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks execution attempts and their outcomes, Pike is “the first person to survive after being injected with lethal doses of execution drugs.”
Eventually, Pike stopped talking. She started snoring.
She continued to snore after the rock was put out the second time and the curtain closed again. We continued to hear her snore over the loudspeaker.
The state’s protocol does not contemplate a second round of drugs failing to kill the prisoner, so there are essentially no rules for the situation the Department of Correction found itself in with Pike.
It’s unclear what was happening behind the curtain. Her lawyers later said they weren’t allowed in the death chamber.
The curtain closed at 8:16 p.m., and we listened to Pike’s snoring for nearly 40 minutes.
Tensions rose between the media witnesses and Carter, the Department of Correction’s communications director. I asked her: “Do they do a third round? Are you going to resuscitate her?” Carter didn’t have an answer. Another witness, Steven Hale of the Nashville Banner, asked why the curtain was closed. The doctor wasn’t certifying Pike’s death. We could all hear her breathing.
At 8:53 p.m., the prison warden, Kenneth Nelsen, came over the loudspeaker and said, “Media witnesses, please exit the area.”
‘Intubated, on a ventilator’
We went out to the news conference, which the Department of Correction usually requires media witnesses to participate in. While one of us was speaking, several emergency vehicles arrived. We saw the caravan leave with its sirens on. That was our only insight into whether Pike was alive.
Pike’s attorneys later confirmed she was hospitalized. As of Oct. 1 she remained in critical condition at an undisclosed Nashville hospital, according to her attorneys.
Her lawyers, in an emergency filing with the Davidson County Chancery Court on Oct. 2, alleged that the execution team apparently didn’t “realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown” and that pentobarbital had “in whole or in part” entered her body instead of her veins.
Pike arrived at the hospital with both of her arms “swollen, burned, and blistered,” they wrote. “She is intubated, on a ventilator, and remains unconscious.”
Pike’s future, as well as that of lethal injection in Tennessee, is uncertain.
Lee, the Republican governor who has paused executions for the rest of the year, leaves office in January. The front-runner in the Nov. 3 election to replace him, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, has been a vocal supporter of the death penalty. After Pike’s failed execution, the Republican candidate posted her solution to X.
“Bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly,” she wrote. “As your governor, I will do just that.”
The electric chair was last used in the United States in Nashville when Tennessee executed Nicholas Sutton in 2020. He was one of five prisoners who chose the electric chair over lethal injection in the state from 2018 to 2020.
This story comes from NPR’s health reporting partnership with Nashville Public Radio and KFF Health News.
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