Tennessee's prisons chief resigned after officials failed to execute Christa Pike with two doses of pentobarbital on Sept. 30, Gov. Bill Lee said. Lee had halted all scheduled executions for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review following the state's second failed execution this year.

Pike remains critically ill, unconscious and on a ventilator at a Nashville-area hospital, her attorneys said in a court filing. They said she arrived with both arms “swollen, burned, and blistered” and asked a court to preserve evidence from the execution attempt. Her lawyers are also seeking to have her death sentence commuted.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, 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.