Carruthers’s lawyers seek permission to challenge Tennessee’s protocol
Christa Pike’s lawyer Randy Spivey, who personally witnessed the events in the death chamber, has released a minute-by-minute declaration about Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Pike, 50, on 30 September. He described a search for a vein that lasted almost an hour, repeated uncertainty about whether the team had found a vein, and doubts about whether the team was doing the right thing before pentobarbital began to flow. The declaration was released as part of separate legal proceedings and attached as an exhibit in a new motion filed on behalf of Tony Carruthers and other death-row prisoners.
Christa Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee, on 4 December 2007. Photograph: J Miles Cary/Reuters
The IV team used up to 10 needles while seeking a line that could deliver a massive dose of pentobarbital. About 20 minutes into the attempt, members began discussing whether Pike’s vein might be “blowing.” Two unidentified members poked the insertion site and said they could not tell whether they had succeeded in finding the vein. One of them said something like, ‘It’s either blood or blown, I need to know,’ according to Spivey.
Spivey’s chronology says the search began at 6.35pm and was completed at 7.24pm, when the team left the chamber assuming everything was going according to plan. Pike remained alive, making snoring and choking sounds, and the execution was eventually called off. After 10 days in hospital, she was returned to prison in Nashville. The report describes Pike as the only prisoner in modern times to survive a full dose of a lethal injection drug. She can now talk and walk, but her long-term prognosis remains unknown.
The account says a person Spivey identified as member two first expressed the fear that Pike’s vein might have blown at 6.53pm. The team then discarded the 20-gauge needle it had been using, saying, ‘It’s not long enough. What is the longest you’ve got?’
At 6.57pm, member two repeated that the vein might be blowing. Member two and IV team member 3 inspected the insertion site and poked it; both said they “can’t tell.” The team agreed two minutes later that it had established a line, only to discover that the line was not properly working.
Member two then said, “I need to work again,” pulled the needle out of Pike’s left arm, and Spivey recorded that it appeared severely bent. At 7.08pm, member two called on the team to think again, saying, “Let’s regroup.” The team checked Pike’s right arm again and poked around the insertion site. At 7.13pm, member two told Pike directly that the team had it, and the pentobarbital injection that the team thought would kill her was set to begin.
At 7.34pm, Pike cried out, “I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns.” Spivey included the remark in the declaration’s chronology of the attempted injection.
The chronology’s repeated doubts and failed attempts to establish a line lend added weight to the vein-burst explanation, one of the most prominent theories behind the failure: if Pike’s vein burst, the pentobarbital would have been diverted into tissue in her arm. An extreme dose entering her bloodstream would almost certainly have killed her, while diversion into tissue could cause severe injuries without killing her. The account presents this as a theory, not a confirmed finding.
The chronology was attached as an exhibit in a new motion filed on behalf of Tony Carruthers and other death-row prisoners. Tennessee attempted to execute Carruthers on 21 May, but he survived after the execution team failed to find a vein in more than 30 minutes. Carruthers’s lawyers have asked permission from the Davidson county chancery court to file a supplemental complaint challenging Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol.
In an initial complaint filed in March 2025, Carruthers’s lawyers warned that a prisoner could face a torturous death by pentobarbital poisoning because the team administering the drug was “incompetent, insufficiently trained, insufficiently dedicated to doing their jobs, and/or insufficiently attentive.” They warned that the execution created an unacceptable risk of violating constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The new motion asserts that the failures in May and September bear out the lawyers’ advance warnings, stating, “The specific failures that Mr Carruthers and Ms Pike endured were predicted, in detail and at length.”
Kit Thomas, an attorney for the death row plaintiffs, said: “Instead of addressing the problems in the 2025 Protocol when we identified them last year, the Tennessee Department of Correction and the Attorney General’s Office doubled down on secrecy and refused to make changes. The result was just as we predicted: extreme pain and suffering for our clients, in botched execution attempts that also inflicted lasting harm on victims’ families, corrections staff, and media witnesses, among others.”
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her friend Colleen Slemmer. She was 18 at the time and spent almost three decades in solitary confinement afterward. The report says the failed execution prompted nationwide soul-searching about the death penalty in the US, and Republican Gov. Bill Lee called off all executions in Tennessee pending a review.
An earlier MSI report counted seven needles in Pike’s left arm, including one that appeared bent while another reported that Tennessee had not explained why Pike survived. Spivey’s new declaration adds a minute-by-minute chronology of the team’s concerns before the pentobarbital flow.