Christa Pike was unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator at a Nashville hospital as of Thursday evening, her lawyers said in a court filing, a day after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her. Her attorneys are demanding that she be spared another execution attempt, calling the procedure “chemical torture,” and seeking to have her death sentence commuted.

Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital Wednesday night and remained alive more than 40 minutes after the last dose, witnesses said. Gov. Bill Lee halted all scheduled executions for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review after the state’s second failed execution this year.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer, committed when Pike was 18. The execution attempt proceeded after the US Supreme Court overturned an appeals court stay issued to review whether her history of childhood sexual abuse had been properly considered at sentencing. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.