A botched lethal injection months before Christa Pike was due to be executed should have seen capital punishment abolished, a campaign group has insisted.
Failed execution of Tony Carruthers
Death Penalty Focus, which supports people on death row, say lessons have not been learned following the failure to execute Tony Carruthers earlier this summer. Tennessee officials called off the lethal injection of Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, after his executioners tried and failed to find a vein.
Governor Bill Lee granted Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year. It remains unclear what the future holds for Pike, 50, who survived two injections of the drug pentobarbital on September 30 and was taken to hospital in a critical condition.
Death Penalty Focus statement
Death Penalty Focus wants capital punishment abolished and told the Mirror: "This was not the first botched execution of a person by the State of Tennessee. As recently as this past May, after trying and failing for over an hour to find a vein to inject a lethal drug into Tony Carruthers, a man with a severe mental illness, with credible claims of innocence that were never investigated, the Tennessee Department of Corrections finally ended its efforts."
"The simple truth is that there is no way to humanely kill a human being who doesn't want to die. A book on lethal injection that was published recently revealed that over 84 per cent of lethal injection autopsies indicated that the executed suffered pulmonary edema from the injection."
"Essentially, they drowned in their own fluids. Is there anyone outside of the American prison system who would argue that drowning in one's own fluids is humane?"
US death penalty landscape
The failed execution of murderer Pike has brought the US death penalty back into sharp focus across the world. The question of whether capital punishment should remain continues to divide America, with major international organisations and various countries holding opposing positions on putting prisoners to death for their crimes.
The penalty is legal in 27 states, while it has been abolished in 23. Almost 1,700 executions have taken place in the modern era since 1977, with the vast majority taking place in southern states, such as Texas and Oklahoma. But since 1973, at least 203 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated.
Pike's case and public opinion
Polling shows that national support for the death penalty in America now stands at an all-time low. Some 52 per cent agree with it, with 44 per cent opposing the life-ending measures. Around 2,000 individuals are currently on state or federal death rows, showing a continuous decline for more than two decades. There were 47 executions carried out last year, up from 25 in 2024, driven largely by an increase in Florida.
Pike was on death row for the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer in January 1995. Slemmer was killed at age 19, after being lured into an isolated area on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. She was convicted alongside her boyfriend in 1996, and the court heard there was a pentagram carved into Slemmer's chest. The mother of Pike's victim is losing hope that her daughter's killer will ever be executed.
