Christa Pike survives lethal injection as US executions hit a 16-year high

US set to carry out up to 38 executions this year

The US is set to carry out up to 38 executions this year, a tally that would be down from last year’s high but larger than in any year since 2013. The most recent came on Wednesday, when Texas executed convicted murderer Jamaal Howard. The Death Penalty Information Center recorded 47 executions in 2025, the highest annual incidence in 16 years, after the annual count had fallen from a 1999 pinnacle of 98 to 71 in 2003 and a low of 11 in 2021. Six years ago, the center opened its yearly report with the words: “Capital punishment continued to wither across the US in 2019.”

Christa Pike, 50, is the only person ever to survive a full lethal-injection execution. For reasons as yet not fully understood, the drug did not enter her bloodstream, probably spilling into her arm tissue, and her execution at Riverbend maximum security institution in Nashville was halted on 30 September. Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder, when she was 18, of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. It took more than an hour to establish the two intravenous lines through which she was to receive the normally lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital, and in that time she did what she could to assist the execution team, pointing to specific parts of her body where she thought they might find a vein as they repeatedly stabbed her with needles. “Please try here,” she said over and over. “Please try here, I think it will be OK. Please try up on my shoulder, higher.” When the team finally achieved what it thought would be a working line, allowing the execution to proceed, Pike made a point of thanking them. “Miss Pike was kind, and she was cooperative,” her lawyer Randy Spivey, a witness in the death chamber, said.

Over the following days, Pike woke shackled to a Nashville hospital bed, her arms grotesquely swollen, facing a long and uncertain road to recovery. On Tuesday she regained consciousness; her lawyers said she is now able to talk and walk around the room, after a period of unconsciousness so profound that even her own legal team feared she might be brain-dead. On Saturday she was released from hospital and returned to the women’s prison in Nashville, where she will still receive medical care. Spivey, who witnessed the execution attempt, said in comments to reporters that he was haunted by the failed execution. “What I saw is not something that should ever happen again. It was done in all of our names.”

“This is a very big moment,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, an alliance of 60 abolitionist groups. “When you see something as horrific as this, the impact is enormous, as it throws attention on the death penalty’s flaws.” Porter has worked on capital punishment for nearly a quarter century, since becoming a leader of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty in 2003, when death-row prisoners were being executed at a rate of more than one a week. “I believe that the death penalty will die by a thousand cuts,” she said. “Every time there’s a botched execution like Christa’s, or a wrongful conviction, or the execution of an intellectually disabled person, public understanding of the system’s flaws grows.”

President Donald Trump has pressed to expand federal use of the death penalty since returning to office. On his first day back, he issued an executive order on “restoring the death penalty,” saying it was “an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes.” The US Justice Department has concluded there is no proof that the punishment deters criminals, and about 4% of people on death row are innocent, by conservative estimations. Toward the end of his first term, the Trump administration executed 13 federal death-row prisoners, including Lisa Montgomery, who had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of all but three prisoners on federal death row.

Using his power as commander-in-chief, Trump this week ordered the military execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooter. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Hasan will face a firing squad of soldiers at Fort Hood on 3 December, what would be the first public execution staged in the US since 1936. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. US politicians denounced the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the execution as “disgusting,” and the United Nations warned the US government, in the same terms it has used with Afghanistan and Iran, that the move would be tantamount to torture.

Trump has also urged death-penalty states, where most capital punishment activity occurs, to accelerate, and many have obliged. First among them has been Florida: Governor Ron DeSantis, who is leaving office, approved a record 19 executions last year, and the state has put to death 16 prisoners this year, with two more executions pending. DeSantis cancelled a lethal-injection procedure on Friday without giving an explanation. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate for governor, has called for the return of the electric chair, the method known as “Old Sparky.”

Trump has also drawn support from Christian nationalist figures. Brooklyn Walker, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville who has studied Christian nationalist views on justice, said she has found them far more embracing of retribution, including the death sentence, than other US religious groups. Christian nationalist leaders frequently invoke Old Testament notions of punitive justice “as part of the idea of creating a social order, and then requiring people to fit within it,” Walker said. Doug Wilson, an Idaho pastor who wants to turn America into a theocracy and has close ties to Hegseth, has pushed for legal appeals to be streamlined so that death-row prisoners could be dispatched more quickly. Joel Webbon, another leading Christian nationalist pastor from Texas, has argued for the death penalty to be expanded to include women who make false sexual assault accusations; the day after Pike’s failed execution, he posted to his 120,000 followers on X that “you cannot be pro life without being pro death penalty.”

The Pike case sits within a wider record of problems with lethal injection, the protocol that has dominated US executions for almost 50 years. By the Death Penalty Information Center’s calculations, there have been 12 botched executions in the past five years alone; five of the condemned prisoners involved, including Pike, survived the procedure, rendered immobile while a team of masked strangers failed to kill them for up to several hours. States seeking alternatives have run into new difficulties. Alabama executed Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith with nitrogen gas a year after each man survived a lethal-injection attempt; the method is regarded by veterinarians as too cruel for the euthanasia of cats and dogs, and it has now been blocked for human use by a federal court. When South Carolina used a firing squad last year to execute convicted murderer Mikal Mahdi, the marksmen missed the target of his heart, causing a prolonged and likely agonizing death. That series of mishaps, spanning failed executions, experimentation, and insinuations of deliberate miss-targeting, is what Porter said she means by “death by a thousand cuts.”

Porter pointed to the 23 states that have abolished the death penalty and the four states that have put the practice on hold, together a majority, and to the growing number of young Americans who no longer support the punishment. In the most recent Gallup poll that asked the question, from 2024, only 42% of adults aged 18 to 34 approved; in last year’s poll, overall support had fallen from a 1995 high of 80% to 52%. She also cited the burgeoning ranks of Republican state lawmakers willing to raise objections and juries’ increasing unwillingness to impose new death sentences. Most of all, she said, she draws strength from families of capital murder victims, some of whom have joined the fight to spare the lives of those who killed their loved ones. “In every campaign I’ve been part of where we’ve ended the death penalty – in Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, and many more – victims’ families have been among the lead voices,” she said.

Pike’s lawyers say she is angry and confused, her mind foggy, but she is also able to inquire after the well-being of others, including the family of her victim, Colleen Slemmer. “We have to ask, ‘How much suffering is enough?’” Spivey said on Wednesday, directing the question at Tennessee.