The prognosis for a Tennessee woman who survived two doses of lethal injection is still unclear, according to her lawyer, who said doctors are still trying to clear the lethal drug administered during her execution attempt.
Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell, the attorney for Christa Pike, said in a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union that his client remains unconscious and intubated in a Nashville hospital.
“She’s still in the hospital, on a ventilator, critically ill,” Ferrell said. “We don’t really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days.”
In a court filing on Thursday, Pike’s attorneys said hospital employees are still working to clear the two lethal doses of pentobarbital given to Pike during her scheduled execution on Wednesday. Ferrell said Sunday that the removal is continuing.
“That’s still the ongoing process right now,” Ferrell said, adding that doctors have yet to determine how Pike survived the injections. He clarified that his team is not communicating directly with doctors, but rather through an individual given medical power of attorney by Pike, and he has not seen Pike while she has been in the hospital.
Ferrell also called on Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) to commute Pike’s death sentence to a life sentence “at the very least.” Lee had previously rejected Pike’s request for clemency.
“It is clear she has endured a tortuous attempt at executing her,” he said. “I think she’s spent over 30 years in prison, most of that in solitary confinement, only to be taken out and not executed, but tried to execute her. … I think she has been put through some really, really bad mental torture and physical torture.”
During Pike’s execution attempt, her lawyers claim Pike could be heard “crying and whimpering” before saying her arm felt like it was “about to burst open.” Additionally, they said in a court filing that “one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.”
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges and sentenced to death in 1996, when she was 20. Pike was convicted and sentenced for murdering her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18, alongside Pike’s then-17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was sentenced to life in prison.
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Ferrell’s comments come after Lee announced that Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada is stepping down following Pike’s botched execution. Strada said his resignation was “in the best interest of Tennesseans” as an independent review examines what happened with Pike’s execution attempt.
Pike’s is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year after the state failed to secure an IV line in death row inmate Tony Carruthers in May. That followed an incident in 2022 when state officials found problems with the drugs that were to be used in inmate Oscar Smith’s execution, acknowledging they had not been properly tested. Smith was eventually executed by lethal injection in 2025.