Christa Pike has spoken publicly for the first time since Tennessee tried to execute her and failed. In a 460-word statement dictated to her lawyers and released on Friday, exactly one month after the September 30 attempt, the 50-year-old said she is recovering — but that recovery has limits she wanted stated plainly.
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” she said. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
“I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger,” she added. “But healing is not the same as being okay.”
Pike went into the execution chamber at Riverbend prison in Nashville on September 30 prepared to die. She had been sentenced to death for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, a crime committed when Pike herself was 18. The state administered two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in Tennessee’s lethal injection process. She did not die.
Instead, Pike was taken to hospital in critical condition, placed on a ventilator, and did not regain consciousness for days. Her lawyers did not expect her to survive. She woke, began talking and walking with assistance, and on October 10 she was returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the prison where she has spent more than 30 years. She remains in its medical ward, still receiving treatment.
“One month ago on September 30, I walked into the execution chamber at Riverbend men’s prison prepared to die,” her statement reads. “Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain.”
She also addressed the family of the woman she killed. “I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” she said. “I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has said the attention on Pike’s condition has pulled focus from her daughter, and that she believes the state owes her an apology. Pike’s statement thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who treated her, and the strangers around the world who have written to her. “To know that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is something I cannot fully put into words,” she said.
Since the night she survived, Pike said, she has been largely cut off from other people. “I spent 28 years in solitary confinement and much of what I am experiencing today is a repeat of that condition,” she said. “That isolation brings its own kind of pain.”
The failed execution was the second to go wrong in Tennessee this year, and it has already cost the state its prison commissioner: Frank Strada resigned after the attempt. Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, paused all executions in the state and ordered an investigation into what went wrong in the death chamber. On October 28, Lee made clear he does not intend to take the death penalty off the table himself. “She’s still incarcerated under the laws of the State of Tennessee,” he told reporters. “I suspect her sentence will be the same as it was before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
Pike’s lawyers, meanwhile, are fighting to prevent a second execution attempt. They had already challenged the state’s new lethal injection protocol in a complaint filed in January, arguing it was untested and risked unnecessary pain and terror. A court ruled on Thursday that they have until late January to file an amended complaint reflecting what happened on September 30, giving them extra time because of her medical condition.
Why this matters goes beyond one prisoner’s statement. Pike is, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, the only person ever to survive being injected with lethal chemicals in an execution. There is no precedent for what a state does next when the machinery of an execution fails and the condemned person wakes up — whether a second attempt is legally or morally possible, and what the state owes someone it tried and failed to kill. Tennessee’s investigation, its paused executions and the coming court filings will shape answers that other death-penalty states will watch closely. For now, the person at the centre of it describes herself as alive, healing, and still in pain every day since the night she was supposed to die.
For background, see our earlier coverage: her survival and her lawyers’ account.
