Christa Pike has woken up ‘angry’ after her botched execution – and I don’t blame her

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If it were fiction, even then you’d think it grotesque: a woman’s life hangs in the balance, while the state dithers over whether to execute her. First, it is planned for 10am Wednesday, then a last-minute reprieve interrupts the process. The woman breathes out. Then a new group overturns that process and decides she must die, again. The state does it – by lethal injection – twice. It doesn’t work. The woman endures both emotional and physical agony. Who wins? Nobody.

Except… this isn’t fiction, of course. Welcome to the life – and botched death – of Christa Pike.

Pike, 50, was raced to a hospital after surviving a double dose of the deadly drug pentobarbital at Riverbend maximum security prison in Nashville on September 30. She is now up and walking as her surprise recovery continues, according to her lawyer. Her legal team said she had no memory of her ordeal and was “angry and confused” about what had happened to her. I don’t blame her.

Once the youngest woman to be on death row, after being sentenced to death aged 18 in 1996 for torturing and killing a classmate – 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer – Christa Pike’s very existence since has been treated like a “will they, won’t they” plot line; a Hunger Games-style gladiatorial fight. And it’s grotesque, inhumane, indecent. It doesn’t absolve her crime, because nothing could. It won’t bring Colleen back. But it does lower us collectively to a base, animal level; one that is no better than the kid who killed another kid, senselessly and coldly and cruelly.

There’s also something peculiarly dystopian about the delivery. I woke to twinned “breaking news alerts” on my phone and squinted into it, half-asleep, as headlines told me Christa Pike – a 50-year-old woman, of flesh and blood – had been “picked to die” after all, like some sort of sick game show. That she had survived two lethal injections, that Tennessee has failed in its attempt to execute her, that she had somehow survived the medieval process at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville and been rushed to hospital.

Officials administered pentobarbital to Pike twice, and witnesses reported the curtain to the execution chamber was drawn and reopened on two separate occasions as the procedure continued.

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Pike’s legal team say she was put through “unnecessary agony” and that the prolonged nature of the attempt had caused her “superadded physical and mental suffering”; that her survival was “unprecedented”? Don’t you wonder at the psychological torture that is telling a human being that they’re going to die – nay, letting her live under that cloud in prison for 32 years – before allowing it to speed up, slow down and speed up again, in a supercharged, hellish 24 hours?

Will you stand down the confetti cannons for Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who has said in a statement that he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred”; who’s promised the remaining scheduled execution would not take place this year? Or, do you find yourselves salivating and champing at the bit for the whole sordid, frightening, sadistic process to get cranked up and rolling again next year, with extra fanfare – maybe additional balloons?

Or do you, like me, find the whole idea of capital punishment gross and obscene, because no civilised society should be treating human beings like cattle.

I’m not alone – some years ago, this newspaper ran an “End the Death Penalty” campaign to try to create awareness, encourage action, and ultimately end capital punishment. The death penalty is currently still legal in 27 states in the US – and it’s a hotbed of inequality. If anything shows a lack of fairness and equity in a country, it is who it decides must die.

Just look at the data: in the past 50 years, the US has put to death at least 1,682 people, and (according to the Death Penalty Information Center), 34 per cent of them were Black and 8 per cent Latino. Study after study has shown the death penalty is used against people of colour in a completely disproportionate way. Miscarriages of justice are an ever-present possibility.

The US is an outlier in terms of how it treats its prisoners – globally, the United Nations says the world is moving away from the use of capital punishment, with 170 of its 193 member countries having already abolished or ceased the use of executions.

It doesn’t come as any surprise to me that executions have risen sharply since Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, with 47 carried out last year (the highest annual total since 2009) and another 28 so far in 2026. This regime has shown itself to be particularly callous: just look at the havoc wreaked on Iran and by ICE. On its own streets.

The Biden administration, in fact, previously removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol for single-drug lethal injections over concerns about the potential for unnecessary pain and suffering – a fear that has now been borne out. The Trump administration brought it back.

The way Christa Pike has been treated is a cruel and unusual punishment indeed. One that should prompt us all to look in the mirror and search for our humanity.

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