Witnesses say Tennessee officials were unable to execute Christa Pike after giving her two doses of the sedative, pentobarbital.
Published On 1 Oct 2026
Officials in the United States have failed to put a Tennessee woman to death for a murder she committed in 1995, after the lethal injection was halted for hours as courts considered a last-minute appeal to stay her execution.
Christa Gail Pike, 50, had been scheduled to die on Wednesday for a killing she committed at age 18, after the US Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling that stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start.
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Her death would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.
Following the top court’s ruling, officials attempted to go ahead with the execution as planned and appeared to give Pike two doses of the sedative pentobarbital, according to media witnesses.
At 7:46pm local time (23:46 GMT), prison officials closed the curtain separating Pike from the media viewing room. It was raised three minutes later, when witnesses said Pike could be heard loudly snoring.
The curtain was closed again at 8:06pm. Witnesses continued to hear Pike snoring until the microphone was switched off at about 8:53pm, when they were told to leave the area. Emergency vehicles were seen coming and going from the prison.
The Tennessee Department of Correction did not immediately explain why the execution had not been completed.
Supreme Court ruling
Pike had initially been scheduled to die on Wednesday morning, and witnesses had already gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay.
The appeals court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered during her sentencing.
Later on Wednesday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to proceed. Its conservative majority did not explain the decision, while the three liberal justices dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that vacating the stay “unnecessarily prevents” the appeals court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.
Tennessee’s attorney general had argued that delaying the execution traumatised the family of Pike’s victim, Colleen Slemmer, and rewarded what it called “abusive delay tactics”.
1995 killing
Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville.
Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse, including that she was raped from early childhood.
“It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her lawyers wrote in a filing.
After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In her clemency petition, she said she had initially intended to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she could not “put the brakes on”.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement.
Slemmer’s mother has said she wants Pike’s death sentence carried out after waiting decades for the execution.
Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed in the US, representing about 1 percent of all executions, according to the centre.
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