Christa Pike is still alive in critical condition after two Tennessee lethal injection attempts failed, her lawyers said, and she even tried to help staff find a vein.

Medical staff spent more than an hour Wednesday night trying to place IV lines in the death row inmate, her attorney told reporters the next afternoon. Pike stayed strapped to the table while they used at least seven needles. One needle came out bent.

By Thursday, counsel said the 1995 murderer of classmate Colleen Slemmer remained alive but in critical condition in Tennessee, a lawful sentence left unfinished after the state’s lethal injection process broke down at the most basic step.

The New York Post reported attorney Randy Spivey’s account of the ordeal: long restraint, repeated needle sticks, and a failed effort to start the drugs that were supposed to carry out her death sentence.

Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee said Pike did not fight the process. He said she tried to make it work.

Ferrell told reporters:

"Pike was not just cooperative, but was trying to help instruct the people placing the IV lines,"

He said she kept offering spots on her own body.

Ferrell recounted her words:

"She over and over again said ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here, I think it will be okay.’"

Lawyers cast the failed IVs as constitutional harm

Ferrell also tied the scene to Pike’s past. He said she had survived sexual abuse, and that being pinned and prodded hit that fear directly.

Ferrell said:

"That was her biggest fear as the survivor of sexual abuse, that she would be pinned down, prodded, poked, cut,"

That is the defense frame: focus on her distress during a sentence imposed for a killing she already committed. Colleen Slemmer never got a second chance after 1995. Tennessee’s job was to finish a lawful punishment without turning the chamber into a prolonged medical mess.

Days earlier, Pike had already sought a different method, including a public push when Christa Pike asked to be hanged rather than take the needle. The state stayed with lethal injection. Then the IV lines would not start cleanly.

Court fight ran up to the final hours

Just The News reported that her attorneys went to court claiming the drugs had already gone in and she was still alive. Their filing said witnesses reported at 8:26 p.m. that both syringes of lethal injection chemicals had been injected, and that Pike was still alive and snoring.

Counsel argued she had not lost consciousness, still had a heartbeat, and that the death chamber curtains had gone down twice. They said the process caused unnecessary agony and violated her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.

An appeals court first stayed the execution. The Supreme Court later allowed it to proceed if finished before midnight. If carried out, Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. She was convicted in the 1995 killing of classmate Colleen Slemmer.

She had also pressed the state on who would carry out the sentence, including when a death row killer demanded an all-women team for the lethal injection. Procedure fights stacked up. The victim’s family waited on a sentence that still did not end.

A sentence on the books still has to be carried out

Lethal injection is supposed to be a controlled, final act of justice, not an hour of failed sticks and bent needles. When staff cannot place a line, the state looks unprepared to do the hard job voters and juries still authorize for the worst murders.

Defense teams will always move to halt an execution. That is their role. It is also why similar fights keep surfacing in other high-profile cases, including when Tyler Robinson’s defense team argued against death eligibility and when Los Angeles prosecutors took the death penalty off the table in another murder case. The pattern is familiar: endless process for the killer, closed casket for the victim.

Pike’s lawyers now say she is alive and in critical condition after two attempts. They describe cooperation, fear, and pain. What they cannot revise is the crime that put her on the gurney, or the fact that Tennessee still owes Colleen Slemmer’s family a finished judgment.

Capital punishment only works as justice when the state can complete it with competence and finality. A murderer guiding needles into her own arm is not mercy theater, it is a warning that the death chamber cannot become another broken government program.