Christa Pike speaks for the first time since Tennessee failed to execute her, and says there has not been a moment without pain

One month after the state of Tennessee injected her twice with a lethal drug and she lived, Christa Pike has said her piece. In a 460 word statement released through her attorneys on Friday, Pike described going into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on September 30 having made her peace, telling the people who loved her that she was grateful and telling the witnesses she was leaving them in loving kindness. Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain, she wrote. There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.

The execution itself is now a matter of public record and public failure. At about 7:40 p.m. on September 30, Pike received the first dose of pentobarbital, and then a second. After an hour of waiting for her to die, officials stopped the execution and called emergency services at 8:40 p.m. Recordings of the 911 calls, obtained by the Associated Press, show the help was then delayed by confusion between first responders and prison officials. Pike was in critical condition for days and did not regain consciousness until October 6. Experts examining the failure have focused on the intravenous line, and on whether the drug pooled in the tissue around it instead of reaching her bloodstream. Her lawyers say her arms were left burned and blistered.

She has been back since October 10 at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the prison where she has spent more than 30 years, held in the infirmary and largely isolated, her lawyers say, in a condition that repeats the 28 years she spent in solitary confinement. Her legal team has filed an emergency motion to end the isolation and is urging Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison. Lee ended all executions in Tennessee for the rest of 2026 after the failure, the second Tennessee execution to go wrong this year, ordered an independent investigation, and accepted the resignation of prison commissioner Frank Strada. This week he gave her lawyers no encouragement. I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts, he told reporters.

What Pike did to get to that chamber is not in dispute, and her statement does not dispute it. In 1995, Pike, then 18, tortured and murdered her Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, in Knoxville. She has been on death row since 1996, the longest serving woman on Tennessee's death row, and she would have been the first woman Tennessee executed in more than 200 years. I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I'm deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position, she wrote. I continue to think about my victim's family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured. I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger. But healing is not the same as being okay. She ended without a claim about what should happen to her. I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next.