Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville ended Wednesday with her being transported to a hospital by ambulance after surviving two doses of a lethal injection drug.
Pike had been scheduled to die for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. The state moved forward after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a last-minute stay that had blocked the execution.
The court’s decision cleared the legal obstacle to carrying out Pike’s sentence. But the administration of the drug did not result in her death, and a day that stretched 14 hours concluded with an ambulance taking her from the prison to a hospital.
The sequence placed two distinct parts of Tennessee’s death penalty process at the center of the case: the court proceedings governing whether an execution could proceed and the state’s implementation of lethal injection once that permission was restored.
Riverbend, in northwest Nashville, houses Tennessee’s execution chamber. Although executions there are carried out under state authority, the prison places that responsibility—and the consequences when an execution goes wrong—within Nashville.
For Pike, Wednesday’s proceedings ended not with the completion of her death sentence, but with hospital transport following the unsuccessful execution attempt.