To Execute of Not To Execute

Here's the short answer, before we get into the long one: yes, under the law as it stands today, Tennessee can almost certainly try again. Surviving your own execution doesn't count as serving a death sentence. But the way Christa Pike survived may hand her lawyers an argument nobody has quite had before.

The night the drugs didn't work

Picture the room. It's 6:34 on the evening of September 30, 2026, inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. A 50-year-old woman is strapped to a gurney while an IV team searches her arms for a vein.

They can't find one that holds. They try one arm, then the other. By her lawyer's count, they go through about ten needles. At one point Pike, the person they are preparing to kill, starts helping them. She tells them to try higher up, in her upper arm. Around 6:57, one team member says a vein "might be blowing." Two others say they can't tell. They keep going.

When the curtain finally opens, Pike gives her last words. She says she's at peace and that she's leaving the world the way she lived most of her life: in love. Then the pentobarbital goes in. Not long after, she tells the room her arm hurts. Later she says it feels like it's about to bust, and that it's burning.

She doesn't die. The state pushes a second full dose. She still doesn't die. Witnesses hear her snoring, then choking, behind the curtain until the microphone is cut. An ambulance takes her to a hospital, where she lies unconscious for days. When she finally wakes, her first words, according to her attorney, are a question: where am I, and who are you?

That night forces a question most of us never think to ask. If the state tries to execute you and fails, is the sentence over? Or does it just pick a new date?

First, Colleen

It would be easy to tell this story as if it started on that gurney. It didn't. It started on January 12, 1995, with a 19-year-old named Colleen Slemmer.

Colleen and Christa Pike were both students in the Job Corps program in Knoxville. Pike, then 18, had convinced herself Colleen was after her boyfriend. She lured Colleen into the woods near the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus, and what happened there was savage. Colleen was cut with a box cutter and beaten with a chunk of asphalt. Afterward, Pike kept a piece of her skull and showed it to classmates.

In March 1996, a Knox County jury convicted Pike of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. The jury found that the killing was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, involving torture, and that it was committed to avoid arrest. It sentenced her to death, which at the time meant the electric chair. On March 30, 1996, Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz formally imposed that sentence, plus 25 more years for the conspiracy. Footage from that day shows a 20-year-old Pike crying and asking to hug her mother.

Pike's boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17, too young for the death penalty, and got life. A third participant testified and got probation. Pike was the only one sentenced to die. Her time in prison hasn't been quiet, either: in 2001 she nearly strangled another inmate with a shoestring, and in 2004 she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder, which added another 25 years.

Colleen's mother, May Martinez, has spent three decades waiting for that sentence to be carried out. She traveled to Nashville to watch it happen. Meanwhile, Pike's lawyers have argued for just as long that a teenager with a history of severe abuse, and with bipolar disorder and PTSD that weren't diagnosed until years later, shouldn't be put to death. You don't have to pick one of those truths. Both are real, and this case only makes sense if you hold them at the same time.

So what actually went wrong?

You'll hear people say Tennessee botched the execution "twice." That's not quite it. There was one attempt, and in that attempt Pike received two full doses of pentobarbital, the single drug Tennessee switched to in 2024.

The bigger question is whether the drug ever really reached her. Her lawyers believe it didn't. Their theory, laid out in a court filing on October 22, is that the IV lines failed and the pentobarbital went into the tissue of her arm instead of her bloodstream. That would explain the burning, the pain she described, and the fact that she lived.

And here's the part that should bother everyone, whatever they think about the death penalty: her veins weren't a surprise. For years, Pike's attorneys had warned the state about her history of difficult vein access. Her January 2026 lawsuit argued that her medical conditions, including a blood disorder, made lethal injection especially dangerous for her. Then, on the night itself, a member of the execution team flagged a possible blown vein before the drug went in.

Tennessee's protocol says that if the prisoner is still alive after the first set of syringes, the team uses a second set. It says nothing about what happens after that. At about 8:15 p.m., attorney Randy Spivey told prison officials the protocol didn't authorize a third dose and asked them to stop. He later told a deputy attorney general that Pike needed immediate medical care.

The aftermath moved fast. Governor Bill Lee paused the state's remaining 2026 execution and ordered an independent review, now led by attorney Ed Stanton. Correction Commissioner Frank Strada resigned. A Nashville chancellor ordered the state to preserve every piece of evidence from that night. Pike left the hospital on October 10 and went back to prison. A state lawyer has said there's currently no pending execution order for her.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In May, Tennessee called off Tony Carruthers' execution after more than an hour of failing to place an IV. So this was the state's second vein-access failure in five months.

Hasn't she already "served" her sentence?

It's a natural thing to wonder, and the idea is old. There's a long folk belief that if the rope breaks, the condemned walks free. It feels like fate has had its say.

The law doesn't see it that way. A death sentence isn't a sentence to go through an execution. It's a sentence to die. A prison term is served by time passing; a death sentence is served only by death. Until that happens, the original judgment is still standing, and the state can ask for a new date.

It helps to separate two pieces of paper. The first is the judgment from 1996: the death sentence itself. The second is the order that actually sets a date. Tennessee doesn't use a governor's "death warrant" the way some states do. Instead, the state asks the Tennessee Supreme Court to schedule the execution, and the court issues an order. That's what happened in Pike's case, when the court granted the state's motion and set September 30, 2026.

That order authorized one execution on one day. Once September 30 came and went, it had done everything it could do, which is why a state lawyer has said there is currently no pending execution order for Pike. But the 1996 death sentence is untouched. To try again, the state would have to go back to the Tennessee Supreme Court and ask for a new date.

What about double jeopardy? The Fifth Amendment says you can't be punished twice for the same crime. But courts have treated a second attempt as finishing the original punishment, not adding a new one. The Supreme Court said so directly almost 80 years ago, in a case out of Louisiana.

The boy who survived the chair

His name was Willie Francis, and he was 17. In May 1946, Louisiana strapped him into a portable electric chair in St. Martinville. The switch was thrown. Francis reportedly cried out that he couldn't breathe and begged them to take it off. The chair had been set up wrong, and he lived.

His lawyers took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that sending him back would be cruel and unusual punishment and a form of double jeopardy. In Louisiana  Francis v. Resweber (1947), the Court disagreed, 5 to 4. The plurality called what happened an "unforeseeable accident." The Constitution, it said, forbids cruelty built into a punishment, not the unintended suffering that comes when a method sometimes fails. A second trip to the chair was not a second punishment.

It was not a proud or comfortable decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter cast the deciding vote while making clear the result troubled him personally; he just didn't think the Constitution forbade it. The four dissenters argued that a state can't keep applying lethal force to a person until it finally works. On May 9, 1947, Louisiana put Willie Francis back in the same chair, and this time it did.

Resweber has never been overruled. It's still the Supreme Court's main word on second attempts, and it's the biggest wall standing in front of Christa Pike.

Is Pike's case really the same as Willie's?

Most modern cases have followed Resweber. In 2009, Ohio spent about two hours trying and failing to find a usable vein on Romell Broom. In 2016, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that the state could try again, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in. Broom died of COVID-19 in 2020 before Ohio got the chance. In Alabama, Kenneth Smith survived a failed IV attempt in 2022 and was executed by nitrogen gas in 2024. The rare exception is Doyle Hamm, also in Alabama, whose failed 2018 attempt ended in a settlement in which the state agreed not to try again.

So where does that leave Pike? Her lawyers' strongest card is one word from 1947: unforeseeable. The Court let Louisiana try again partly because no one could have seen the chair's failure coming. Pike's failure, by contrast, looks like it was seen coming from a long way off. Her attorneys had warned about her veins for years. They raised her medical conditions in a lawsuit nine months before the execution. Tennessee had just failed to place an IV on Tony Carruthers. And on the night itself, someone on the team said a vein might be blowing, and the process kept going anyway. As Spivey put it, the outcome was "foreseeable and foreseen."

There's also the question of what she actually went through. Willie Francis felt the current and lived. Pike spent nearly an hour being stuck with needles, then described burning pain as the drug went in, then received a second dose, then spent days unconscious. A court weighing whether a second attempt is cruel will be weighing that history, not a clean mechanical glitch. And Tennessee's protocol, which simply runs out of instructions after the second dose, will invite the question of whether the state can lawfully repeat a process it has just shown it can't control.

All of that is real. But it's also true that none of these arguments has won at the Supreme Court. Under Baze v. Rees (2008) and Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), a prisoner challenging a method of execution usually has to show a substantial risk of severe pain and point to a known, available alternative the state could use instead. That's a steep climb, even with facts like these.

Where does she go from here?

The most likely route is a federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the law that lets people sue state officials for violating their constitutional rights. Pike could argue that what happened on September 30 inflicted unconstitutional pain and suffering, and she could ask a court to stop the state from trying the same thing again.

Those are really two separate fights. Asking for money for what already happened means getting past qualified immunity, which protects officials unless they broke clearly established law. Asking a court to block a second attempt means running straight into Resweber, Baze, and Bucklew. Either way, the details in the October 22 filing, from the ten needles to the warning about a blown vein, are exactly the kind of evidence those cases will turn on. That's why the court's order to preserve everything from that night matters so much. Her lawyers have called it a first step of many.

There are paths outside the courtroom, too. The governor can commute a death sentence to life. And nothing happens without a new order from the Tennessee Supreme Court, which isn't likely to set a date before the state's independent review is finished. Pike's lawyers have already asked for more time ahead of her first hearing since the failed attempt.

So as of late October 2026: a death sentence still on the books, no order setting a new date, no ruling on her claims, and a pause on Tennessee executions through the end of the year.

The bottom line

Can Tennessee legally try to execute Christa Pike again? Under the law as it's written today, probably yes. Has she unwillingly served her sentence by surviving? No. A death sentence isn't satisfied by living through it.

But the case is not as simple as 1947. The Supreme Court let Louisiana try again because the failure was an accident nobody could have seen coming. Pike's failure was warned about for years, flagged in the room, and repeated with a second dose. Whether the old "unforeseeable accident" reasoning can stretch to cover that is a question no court has answered yet. This case may be the one that forces an answer.

Wherever you land on the death penalty, it's worth sitting with both sides of this for a moment. A mother has waited 31 years for justice for her daughter. A woman who did something monstrous at 18 helped strangers look for a vein in her own arm, felt it burn, and woke up in a hospital asking who everyone was. The law owes both of them a clear and honest answer, and so far it hasn't given one.

In Memorium - Colleen Slemmer was only 19 years old when she was savagely murdered. May she rest in peace.

She Survived Her Own Execution. Can Tennessee Try Again?