Statement about the botched execution of Christa Pike

October 1, 2026

Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty. The governor must commute Christa’s sentence now.

Last night, the State of Tennessee recklessly and callously sought to execute Christa Pike, notwithstanding the warnings of medical experts that Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol would cause her to experience agonizing pain and psychological terror. Today, Christa remains in the hospital after the State tried and failed to execute her over the course of two hours. We do not know whether she will recover and what her recovery will look like. We are heartbroken for Christa’s family, friends, and her legal team for having to endure the consequences of the state’s barbarity.

After she was strapped to the gurney, the execution team inserted at least seven different needles in her left arm over the course of an hour. According to Christa’s lawyer Randy Spivey, one of the needles appeared to be bent as they removed it from her arm. Medical experts had anticipated these problems based on Christa’s small veins and a condition called thrombocytosis. When the executioners finally inserted an IV and injected the poison, something went terribly wrong. Although they injected her with double the usual dose of pentobarbital, Christa did not die. While some media outlets reported that she was “snoring,” her attorney and others stated that she whimpered, heaved, choked, breathed deep and raspy breaths, and moved frequently. At one point she stated that she felt her arm was burning up.
Christa’s lawyers demanded that the prison halt the execution, they begged the courts and the governor to intervene, and they were met with stony silence while Christa suffered. Two and a half hours after the execution process began, the prison finally called an ambulance to take Christa to the hospital, where she is receiving treatment.

While we await news of Christa’s condition, it is important to remember that she should never have faced execution in the first place. Everyone agrees that Christa was an eighteen-year-old survivor of childhood sexual abuse and serial rapes at the time of her crime, and everyone agrees that her jury never had the opportunity to consider that evidence because her trial lawyers failed to present it. This alone should have been enough to overturn Christa’s death sentence and stop her execution.

In addition, psychologist Bethany Brand testified that because of Christa’s severe post-traumatic stress disorder, being immobilized on a gurney while being poked and prodded with needles would very likely trigger a flashback of her rapes. Given this, we cannot separate the deliberate cruelty of Tennessee’s actions from Christa’s identity as a survivor of sexual violence. We therefore conclude that the gratuitous and extreme pain inflicted by Tennessee’s executioners was not only torture but was also an act of gender-based violence.

The State of Tennessee bears the blame for this injustice. Its lawyers repeatedly discredited Christa’s accounts of sexual violence, calling her a pathological liar even though her rapes at the ages of 11 and 17 were corroborated by court documents, police reports, and hospital records. One month before Christa’s execution, the State finally acknowledged the truth of her suffering. By then it was too late. While one court issued a temporary stay of execution to examine the State’s about-face, Tennessee appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which vacated the stay and cleared a path for Christa’s execution. In their dissents, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson castigated their colleagues for failing to appreciate “our own fallibility” and for risking irretrievable harm. The majority of the Court was unmoved.

While many media outlets focus on the details of Tennessee’s botched execution attempt, the real takeaway of this story is the flimsiness of the legal architecture upholding capital punishment. The courts knew that Christa could face unbearable pain during her execution. They knew that being strapped to a gurney was likely to trigger a flashback to her childhood rapes. They knew that the State had invoked debunked myths about survivors of sexual violence to discredit Christa’s accounts of rape, preventing a fair analysis of her trial lawyers’ negligence. Yet the courts did nothing.

We recognize Christa Pike’s humanity, her right to dignity, her rights to protection and redress as a survivor of gender-based violence, and her right to be free of torture. We do not yet know if Christa will survive the horror she experienced last night. If she does, Governor Bill Lee must immediately commute her sentence in recognition of the torture she has already endured.