The only woman on Tennessee ‘dєatᩚh row’ is in hospital after two injections failed to 𝘬iᩚll her.
This handout picture dated January 12, 2023 provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction, shows convicted American murderer Christa Pike [File: AFP]
Two doses of a lethal injection drug have failed to 𝘬iᩚll Christa Gail Pike, a 50-year-old woman who was due to be executed on Wednesday. Pike was taken to hospital after it was found that her heart was still beating following the procedure.
Pike’s lawyers told reporters on Thursday that she is critically ill and receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital.
“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers who attended the execution attempt, said. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now.”
Her lawyers have repeated their calls for Pike’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison after she endured what they called “chemical torture”.
Pike would have been the first woman in more than 200 years to be put to dєatᩚh in Tennessee and was the only woman on the state’s dєatᩚh row. Her attempted execution with doses of the sedative pentobarbital went ahead despite a last-minute stay by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, which was overturned just an hour before her execution by the Supreme Court.
Human rights experts said the botched execution illustrates why the dєatᩚh penalty is inhumane and should be abolished.
Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has represented many American dєatᩚh row inmates as well as detainees held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre, told Al Jazeera: “I’ve been in the execution chamber with six of my clients and it’s never the clinical process they’d have you believe. And it’s always a desperate midnight struggle to stop it.”
He added: “In the end, you have to question whether this makes the world a better, more civilised place. Why, indeed, do we 𝘬iᩚll people to prove that 𝘬iᩚlling people is wrong?”
Ahead of the planned execution, Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN special rapporteur on arbitrary executions, told the UK’s Times newspaper: “If executed, Christa Pike would be a victim of torture to dєatᩚh. This will be a gross violation of human rights.”
Tennessee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while it investigates the incident.
What is the case against Pike?
Pike was found guilty of the murder of another young woman she had viewed as a romantic rival, when she was aged 18, more than 30 years ago.
In January 1995, Pike, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, into a wooded area and tortured and killed her. All four were students at a Job Corps vocational centre in Knoxville.
The case attracted huge public interest, especially after it was revealed that the attackers had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, which Shipp later admitted to doing. Pike, who delivered the 𝘬iᩚlling blow to the victim’s head, smashing her skull, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull afterwards.
Pike and Shipp confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. Pike was sentenced to dєatᩚh; Shipp, who was 17 at the time and therefore ineligible for the dєatᩚh penalty, received life with the possibility of parole.
Her case is highly unusual in that she is a woman and was a teenager when she carried out the murder. Other dєatᩚh row inmates who were convicted at the age of 18 – all men – have had their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.
“Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions,” her lawyers wrote. They also argued that Pike had been the victim of appalling childhood 𝘢bu𝘴e – including two rapes when she was aged 11 and 17.
Stafford Smith told Al Jazeera: “Very few women are executed, but fewer still in Tennessee – it has been 200 years. So, this is a step back to about 1820. Christa was just a teenager, and had undergone horrendous 𝘢bu𝘴e as a child. Now she is 50, a totally different person. It is so pointless – will this really make the world a more civilised place?”
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, however, has spoken out in support of the execution.
On Wednesday, a federal court temporarily put the planned execution on hold, on legal and technical grounds. But an hour before the midnight ᴅᴇᴀᴅline for her execution was to expire, the US Supreme Court overruled the stay on her execution, paving the way for jail authorities to proceed.
Pike had asked to be sH๏τ by an all-female firing squad instead of by lethal injection, which she said she feared would be too painful.
Her lawyers had also argued that the injection would be torturous for her as she has “small veins”. This request was denied, however.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
