ALSO SEE: Tennessee Governor Halts Executions After Christa Gail Pike Survives Lethal Injection Attempt

Christa Pike, who was convicted in a brutal 1995 killing, continued breathing after she was given two doses of lethal injection drugs, her lawyers said.

Convicted murderer Christa Pike continued to breathe for nearly an hour after she was administered two rounds of lethal injection drugs Wednesday night, according to court filings by her legal team, prompting the state to halt her execution and begin emergency medical care.

Gov. Bill Lee (R) said late Wednesday that he was halting all scheduled executions for the rest of 2026 and ordering a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”

Representatives of the media who were in the death chamber in a Nashville prison described a harrowing scene, as Pike continued to talk, breathe and snore long after the proceeding was underway. Her lawyers said in a statement late Wednesday that Pike was being treated at a nearby hospital and that they had not been updated on her condition.

“This is one of the worst botched executions in the modern death penalty era,” Robin Maher, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, said in an email. “Her attorneys warned of this exact scenario and were ignored.”

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement. The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that prison officials followed execution protocols.

Pike was 18 years old when she helped carry out a brutal murder of fellow teen Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995.

May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, and her husband traveled to Tennessee from Florida to watch Pike be put to death. Before the scheduled execution, she said in an interview with WBIR Channel 10: “I want Colleen to be at rest, without having constant reminders.”

As of late Wednesday, state officials had yet to confirm whether Pike was still alive. If so, she would be the second death row inmate in the state to survive a botched execution this year.

In an email, an attorney for Pike said the legal team had filed motions amid the execution process for an emergency stay to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.

“We take no pleasure in being right,” Pike’s attorneys said in a statement, “but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”

The chaotic night unfolded after a flurry of last-minute federal court rulings that temporarily halted — and then quickly reinstated — Pike’s planned execution.

Just hours before she was initially scheduled to die Wednesday morning, the 6th Circuit issued a stay to weigh whether Pike’s history as a sexual abuse victim was properly considered in her case.

The state asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the lower court, and by the time the sun had gone down, a majority of justices had vacated the stay. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

Witnesses to the scheduled execution all described a similar scene.

“It appeared this did not go as it was supposed to go,” John North, a reporter at TV station WBIR, told reporters around 9:30 p.m. Central time Wednesday.

North and other members of the media recounted how they were escorted into the witness chambers a little before 7 p.m. The curtains opened for the first time at 7:26 p.m., with Pike nearby on a gurney.

Several witnesses said Pike spoke about having love even for those who hated her, and how she was looking forward to finally being free. She had a spiritual adviser by her side and closed by saying, “This is a happy day,” said Associated Press reporter Kim Chandler.

But the execution soon appeared to falter. The witnesses said prison officials closed the curtains at 7:46 p.m., though Pike could be heard snoring. They reopened them several minutes later, but then closed the curtains once again at 8:05 p.m., after which she could still be heard snoring and breathing loudly.

At 8:53 p.m., the group said, a prison official said, “Will the witnesses please exit the area?”

“When we left the building, we did not know if she was still alive,” North said.

Witnesses said they could hear Pike breathing as they departed, and onlookers watched as an ambulance drove away from the prison Wednesday night. It was not clear whether Pike was inside.

“A lot of this execution, or attempted execution, or whatever it was, happened when we could not see what was going on,” said Steven Hale, a reporter for the Nashville Banner.

In May, Tennessee botched the planned lethal injection of convicted murderer Tony Carruthers at the same Nashville prison.

In a statement at the time, the Department of Correction said medical personnel had quickly established a primary IV line for Carruthers but were not able to establish a backup line as required by the state’s execution protocol. A subsequent effort to insert a central line also failed, and officials eventually called off the execution.

Maria DeLiberato, an attorney for the death row inmate, later described to media how Carruthers had bled and groaned in pain, calling it “horrible” to watch.

Lee, the Tennessee governor, granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

Two months after the incident, more than 40 doctors and nurses sent a letter to Lee, imploring him to halt executions in the state and devise a protocol that would not require medical professionals to participate in the killing.

“If Tennessee is going to continue executing prisoners, it must find a way to do so that does not inflict severe pain and suffering on the person being executed and does not require the involvement of medical professionals contrary to their ethical obligations,” they wrote.

During a three-day evidentiary hearing in August, Pike’s attorneys also had challenged the state’s lethal injection protocol, pointing to the Carruthers case.

Pike’s attorneys argued that she faced related, and potentially even greater, risk due to a blood disorder. They said her small veins would create a heightened risk of complications during lethal injection, as well as the possibility of extreme pain and bleeding. Rather, they requested the state consider alternative methods of execution, namely a firing squad or hanging.

Ultimately, Senior Judge W. Mark Ward ruled in the state’s favor, saying Tennessee protocols would not violate Pike’s constitutional rights.

In their petition Wednesday to the Supreme Court, Tennessee officials had written that any further delay amounted to only more harm for the family of Slemmer, who was beaten, tortured and repeatedly slashed with a knife.

In the lead-up to Pike’s execution, hundreds of legal advocates and trauma experts filed amicus briefs to the Tennessee and U.S. supreme courts and pleading letters to Lee, asking for the state to commute her sentence to life in prison. The governor rejected Pike’s clemency petition.

The case drew international attention amid an uptick in executions nationwide because of a host of extraordinary circumstances: that Pike was a woman, that she committed the crime as a teenager and that before the killing, she had spent her life suffering from mental illness and repeated sexual abuse.

Of the more than 200 people sentenced to death in Tennessee’s modern era, only eight were just 18 at the time of their offense, Pike’s attorneys had written in her clemency petition. The death sentences of the other seven people — each of them male — were eventually vacated.

Pike’s scheduled execution date came more than 31 years after the night in January 1995 when she and two other teens — her boyfriend and another girl — lured Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville and then tortured and killed her. The teenagers knew each other through the Knoxville Job Corps, and prosecutors argued that Pike believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend.

Pike admitted to hitting the girl in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, records show.

Of the three teens present for the killing, Pike was the only one to be capitally charged. The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was ineligible for a death sentence because he was 17 years old. He was sentenced to life in prison and is now eligible for parole. The other teenage girl, Shadolla Peterson, testified against Pike and Shipp and received probation.

While incarcerated, Pike was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder in an Aug. 24, 2001, assault on another inmate.

Recent months had seen a push from death penalty opponents and Pike’s attorneys to spare her life.

In a 226-page clemency petition, her legal team detailed a childhood marked by neglect, sexual abuse and repeated failures of adults and the institutions intended to protect her from harm.

The trauma Pike suffered included repeated sexual assault at the hands of a family member’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, according to the petition. Attorneys detail how, at age 11, she was sexually assaulted by a neighbor who was arrested and pleaded no contest to charges related to the case, only to serve no prison time.

At 17, according to the petition, Pike was again attacked, assaulted and raped by a stranger in North Carolina. The man was never identified or prosecuted.

Pike’s attorneys and legal advocates with expertise in trauma and sexual violence also have argued that the woman’s initial defense team did a subpar job of explaining her actions within the context of her own repeated abuse.

Amicus briefs by the Cornell School of Law on behalf of advocates of sexual trauma survivors were also filed before the Tennessee and U.S. supreme courts, writing plainly that they believe the likelihood Pike will “involuntarily relive her rapes during her execution is extremely high.”

The Tennessee Supreme Court denied her motion for a stay of execution last week. On Monday, Lee rejected Pike’s clemency request, saying he would not intervene. The U.S. Supreme Court also denied her appeal the night before Wednesday’s planned execution.

Then, Wednesday morning, a panel of the 6th Circuit temporarily halted the execution after Pike’s attorneys claimed prosecutors had “conceded” for the first time during the August hearing that the woman was a survivor of sexual abuse.

“For the State to now recognize that the abuse and its impact were very real certainly impugns the integrity of the state court process as well as the habeas court’s careful review of the constitutionality of that process,” the decision stated.

In its petition to the Supreme Court to vacate that stay, the state called the last-minute request by Pike’s attorneys “gamesmanship” and argued that Pike was unlikely to succeed on the merits.

The Supreme Court majority did not explain the court’s reasoning for overruling the lower court on Wednesday evening.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, chastised the high court in their dissenting opinion for interceding in the 6th Circuit’s “routine administrative handling of a capital case” and wrote that it “unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.”

“Worse, the Court grants such extraordinary relief solely to allow the State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts,” Sotomayor wrote. “I see no reason to short circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”