Christa Pike Survived Two Lethal Doses, and Tennessee Is Now Protecting Their Source
Tennessee prison officials have told a court that the company supplying the state’s lethal injection drug fears harassment and would stop selling it if its identity became public.
The claim comes as the state fights to keep secret the source of the pentobarbital used in its failed attempt to execute Christa Pike.
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The assertion appears in a declaration from an unnamed official of the Tennessee Department of Correction, who described the job as procuring pentobarbital for executions. The official wrote of awareness that suppliers believe disclosure would bring “harassment, retaliation and retribution” on the companies and their employees.
According to the declaration, the current supplier has made clear that it would end the arrangement if named. The filing asks a judge to spare the state from revealing who the supplier is. It does not identify the official or the company.
Pike, 50, is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. The state tried to execute her on Sept. 30, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay imposed by a federal appeals court and two days after Gov. Bill Lee refused clemency.
Her lawyers said the execution team spent about an hour struggling to establish intravenous access before administering two doses of pentobarbital. Journalists who witnessed the proceeding described snoring, gasps and complaints of pain from Pike, who kicked her feet hard enough to knock off the sheets covering her. Her attorneys said she was alive and loudly snoring when she was taken from the prison by ambulance.
She was placed on a ventilator in critical condition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, regained consciousness on Oct. 6 and was discharged four days later. She was returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she is held in solitary confinement in the infirmary. Her lawyers have called the episode torture.
Legal experts have said the likeliest explanation is that the drug entered tissue around a misplaced IV rather than a vein, a theory consistent with her attorneys’ argument that staff failed to recognize blown veins or improperly placed lines.
Lee called the procedure “deeply disturbing,” ordered an independent review and said no further executions would take place this year. Ed Stanton, a former U.S. attorney who led a review of the state’s lethal injection protocol in 2022, was retained to examine whether the Tennessee Department of Correction followed its own procedures and whether changes are needed.
Three days after the attempt, Lee announced that Commissioner Frank Strada would step down. Strada took over the department in January 2023 after serving as a deputy director of Arizona’s corrections system, where three executions he oversaw drew scrutiny over IV problems.
He said stepping aside served Tennesseans while the review proceeds, and he maintained that the state had followed its protocol. Pike‘s lawyers called the resignation justified but of no help to her now.
Pike‘s was the second failed execution under Strada this year. On May 21, the state called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after the team failed for more than an hour to find a usable vein.
Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve. In an audio recording released by her lawyers, Pike had described his halted execution as her “worst nightmare.” A January filing in her lawsuit against Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and Strada had warned that a rare blood disorder, an elevated platelet count and a history of difficult needle insertions made lethal injection especially dangerous for her.
The identity of the drug supplier has been contested for years. Tennessee law shields anyone involved in procuring execution chemicals, including vendors, and the state has argued in other litigation that even seemingly harmless details could lead investigators to a supplier.
Lawyers for death row prisoners counter that no commercial manufacturer of pentobarbital sells it to corrections departments, which they say means Tennessee bought on the gray market. In an earlier case before Chancellor Russell Perkins, a state lawyer warned that naming the supplier would cost the department its access to the drug, a claim the inmates’ attorney, Kelley Henry, disputed.
In a deposition last November, a state attorney told Strada not to answer whether Tennessee and Arizona used the same supplier. The department spent nearly $600,000 on execution drugs between 2017 and 2025.
Outside experts say the secrecy carries costs. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University, has said none of the current routes to obtaining execution drugs amounts to a legal, authorized market, and that secrecy exists to prevent independent evaluation.
Corinna Barrett Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond, has said states must either breach private contracts or buy from compounding pharmacies willing to sell. States respond that disclosure invites public pressure, boycotts and lawsuits.
In the courts, a Davidson County judge ordered the state on Oct. 7 to preserve all evidence connected to the attempt. Pike has asked a federal court on an emergency basis to block her return to her former housing block, arguing that her weakness leaves her unable to protect herself, and has since asked to be moved out of solitary confinement and into the general population.
Her legal team includes Randy Spivey, Kelley Gleason, Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen. One legal scholar has said Tennessee can probably attempt to execute her again, a question the review and the courts may now have to settle.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, killed Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps center.
Slemmer was stabbed and beaten on the University of Tennessee‘s agricultural campus, and investigators said a pentagram was carved into her chest and a piece of her skull was taken as a keepsake. A third student, who kept watch, received probation in exchange for cooperating, and Shipp was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996, and a 2004 conviction for trying to strangle a fellow inmate added 25 years to her term. Slemmer‘s mother, May Martinez, has said she wants the sentence carried out.
Pike‘s lawyers say she endured years of physical and sexual abuse and neglect as a child, has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, and has become a remorseful woman. Pike has said she was a mentally ill 18-year-old who is sickened by what she did.
