Christa Pike’s IV team warned vein could ‘explode’ before execution fails | Christine Pike

The Tennessee execution team tasked with running an intravenous line into death row inmate Christa Pike’s arms, through which she could receive a lethal dose of pentobarbital, repeatedly warned her vein could “explode” before continuing with the procedure, her lawyer revealed.

Members of the intravenous (IV) team used up to 10 needles to try to establish a line through which Pike could be killed with a massive dose of sedative. About 20 minutes into the attempt, they began discussing among themselves whether the prisoner’s vein was “exploding.”

Two unidentified members of the team began searching the site through which they were attempting to lay the line, and both agreed that they could not say whether they had succeeded in finding the lode. “One of them said something like, ‘It’s either blood or it’s blown up, I need to know,'” the attorney’s new account states.

The potentially critical new details about how the Tennessee execution squad failed to kill Pike, 50, on Sept. 30 are contained in the most detailed account yet given by Pike’s attorney, Randy Spivey.

In a statement released in separate legal proceedings, Spivey gave a minute-by-minute timeline of Pike’s ordeal, which he personally witnessed in the death chamber.

The account suggests that the IV team was plagued by doubts even before the pentobarbital started flowing, as they struggled to find a vein for nearly an hour. The search began at 6:35 p.m. that evening and ended at 7:24 p.m., at which point the team left the chamber assuming everything was going according to plan.

But Pike remained alive, making snoring and choking noises.

The execution was eventually called off and after 10 days in the hospital, Pike was returned to prison in Nashville. She is the only modern-day prisoner to survive a full dose of a lethal injection drug.

Although she can now talk and walk, her long-term prognosis is still unknown. The gruesome events surrounding his failed execution prompted nationwide scrutiny of the death penalty in the United States and forced Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, to cancel all executions in the state pending a review.

Spivey’s blow-by-blow timeline provides distressing new details about Team IV’s efforts to find a vein, as well as their deep concerns about whether they were doing the right thing. A person on Team IV referred to by Spivey as “member two” first expressed concern that Pike’s vein would be destroyed at 6:53 p.m.

The team then threw away the 20-gauge needle they were using, saying, “‘It’s not long enough.’ What’s the longest you have?”

Three minutes later, at 6:57 p.m., Member 2 repeated, “It could explode.” Spivey reported, “Team IV Member 2 and Member 3 inspected the insertion site and searched it. Both said they ‘couldn’t tell.'”

Despite the uncertainty, the IV team agreed among themselves that they had established a line just two minutes later, only to discover that it was in fact not working properly. “I have to work again,” Member Two said as he removed the needle from Pike’s left arm. “It appeared to be seriously bent,” Spivey reports.

At 7:08 p.m., the second member called the team to think again. “Let’s regroup,” he said. They started checking Pike’s right arm again and searching around the insertion site. At 7:13 p.m., Member Two told Pike directly that they “got her” and that the pentobarbital injection that they thought would kill her was about to begin.

The revelations of so many doubts and foiled efforts to find a dividing line, including critical fears that his vein might have exploded, give added weight to one of the most important theories to emerge about how the execution failed and how Pike survived. If the drug had entered her bloodstream in such an extreme dose, she would almost certainly have died, but if her vein had burst, the pentobarbital would have been diverted into the tissues of her arm, causing serious injury but not killing her.

As Spivey noted in his timeline, at 7:34 p.m., Pike cried out, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst. It’s burning.”

Spivey’s detailed, minute-by-minute account is included as an exhibit in a new lawsuit filed on behalf of Tony Carruthers and other death row inmates. Tennessee attempted to execute Carruthers on May 21, but he, too, survived after the execution team failed to find a vein in more than 30 minutes.

Carruthers’ attorneys have requested permission from the Davidson County Chancery Court to file a supplemental lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol. They first filed a complaint in March 2025, in which they warned that the prisoner faced a gruesome death from pentobarbital poisoning because the team administering the deadly drug to him was “incompetent, insufficiently trained, insufficiently dedicated to doing their job and/or insufficiently attentive.”

As such, they warn, the execution poses an unacceptable risk of violating constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

The failure of the executions in May, then that of Pike in September, confirmed the lawyer’s prior warnings, the new motion states. “The specific failures that Mr. Carruthers and Ms. Pike endured were predicted, in detail and at length,” the new motion states.

Kit Thomas, an attorney for the death row plaintiffs, said: “Instead of fixing the problems with Protocol 2025 when we identified them last year, the Tennessee Department of Corrections and the Attorney General’s Office have increased secrecy and refused to make changes. The result has been exactly as we predicted: extreme pain and suffering for our clients, in botched execution attempts that have also inflicted lasting harm on victims’ families, staff prison and media witnesses, among others.”

Pike was sentenced to death for the murder of her friend Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She was 18 at the time of the murder and spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement.