There is an obvious flaw in any execution: the condemned person might not die. It sounds like something from a particularly black comedy. The rope fails, the electricity cuts out, the poison doesn’t work, or somebody opens the coffin and discovers its occupant would rather like to get out.
Except it has happened repeatedly, and on 30 September 2026 it apparently happened again.
Christa Gail Pike was strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Tennessee to be executed for the brutal 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. There should be no ambiguity about why Pike was there. In January 1995, Pike, then 18, lured Slemmer to an isolated area near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus in Knoxville. Together with two other teenagers, she attacked and tortured Slemmer before killing her. The details of the murder are appalling. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
More than thirty years later, Tennessee attempted to carry out that sentence. The curtains to the execution chamber opened at 7.27pm and Pike gave what were supposed to be her final words. Officials then administered pentobarbital.
She didn’t die, but Tennessee’s execution protocol anticipated that possibility. A second set of syringes was available if the prisoner remained alive after the first dose, so the second set was administered. Pike still didn’t die.
Witnesses reported that she remained alive and could be heard loudly snoring after the curtains were closed. Earlier, she had raised her head and asked officials whether her arm was supposed to feel the way it did. Eventually the microphone was switched off, witnesses were removed and Pike was taken by ambulance to an outside medical facility.
There was nowhere else for the execution team to go. The Tennessee Department of Correction subsequently said that every step of the state’s approved execution protocol had been followed. The protocol simply contained no further procedure once the two permitted rounds of drugs had been administered. They had, quite literally, run out of execution.
Governor Bill Lee halted Tennessee’s remaining execution scheduled for 2026 and ordered an independent investigation. Pike remained alive.
Her survival does not lessen her crime. It does not erase the suffering of Colleen Slemmer or her family, and it certainly does not mean that Pike should simply walk out of prison. It does, however, raise a question considerably older than lethal injection. What happens when someone survives their own execution?
It happened to Anne Greene in Oxford in 1650. Greene was twenty-two when she was convicted of infanticide and sentenced to hang. She was left suspended for around half an hour before being cut down, placed in a coffin and taken away. Her body was destined for anatomical dissection, but Anne wasn’t dead.
Signs of life were discovered and physicians, including Thomas Willis and William Petty, attempted to revive her. Against the odds, they succeeded. Greene recovered and was subsequently pardoned. She married, had children and lived for years after the day on which the authorities had intended her life to end.
Anne Greene was not unique. In Edinburgh in 1724, Margaret, better known as Maggie Dickson, was hanged in the Grassmarket after being convicted under a law concerning the concealment of pregnancy following the death of her newborn child. Her body was placed in a coffin and taken away.
Somewhere along the road to Musselburgh, there came a sound from inside it. Maggie Dickson was alive. She recovered and became famous as Half-Hangit Maggie, reportedly living for decades afterwards.
Then there was William Duell. In November 1740, the teenager was hanged at Tyburn. Contemporary records state that he remained hanging for at least twenty-two minutes before his body was taken to Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. The surgeons were preparing to dissect him when somebody noticed that Duell was still breathing. He groaned and gradually began to recover.
The really extraordinary part of the story came next. The authorities considered taking him straight back to Tyburn and finishing the job. According to the journal of Sheriff Sir Richard Hoare, the warrant remained valid for the rest of the day. A crowd had gathered outside the hall, however, and officials apparently thought better of dragging the newly revived teenager back to the gallows. Duell was eventually returned to Newgate and his sentence was later commuted to transportation for life.
The possibility of an executed prisoner unexpectedly reviving was clearly not unknown. Records of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company show that as early as 1587 it had considered what should happen if a supposedly dead criminal delivered for dissection turned out to be alive. There was effectively a procedure for resurrection.
The mechanics of historical hanging help explain some of these cases. For much of history, hanging did not necessarily involve the calculated long drop intended to fracture or dislocate the neck. Death could instead result from strangulation, obstruction of blood flow to the brain or a combination of injuries. Sometimes it simply didn’t happen.
John Smith discovered that on Christmas Eve 1705. Convicted of housebreaking, Smith was hanged at Tyburn before a reprieve arrived while he was already suspended from the gallows. He was cut down and survived, earning the nickname Half-Hanged Smith.
There are other accounts, some considerably better documented than others, of condemned prisoners surviving ropes, firing squads and execution chambers. The development of supposedly scientific methods of execution did not solve the problem. It merely modernised it.
On 3 May 1946, seventeen-year-old Willie Francis was strapped into Louisiana’s electric chair after being convicted of murder. The switch was thrown, the equipment malfunctioned and Francis survived.
Louisiana decided that it would execute him again. Francis’s lawyers objected and the argument eventually reached the United States Supreme Court in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber. The case presented the court with an extraordinary legal problem: if someone has already been strapped into an electric chair and subjected to an attempt to execute them, can the state simply try again?
Francis’s lawyers argued that another electrocution would violate constitutional protections against double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court disagreed. The majority regarded the failed execution as an accident rather than an intentional attempt to inflict unnecessary suffering. Francis had been sentenced to death and, because he remained alive, that sentence had not been completed.
This is an important distinction. Francis had not been sentenced to one attempt at electrocution. He had been sentenced to death. Willie Francis was therefore placed in the electric chair again on 9 May 1947, and the second attempt killed him.
The legal question did not disappear with Francis. More than sixty years later, Ohio attempted to execute Romell Broom by lethal injection. On 15 September 2009, executioners spent around two hours attempting to establish usable intravenous access. Broom was punctured at least eighteen times before the execution was abandoned and he was returned to death row.
Ohio subsequently sought permission to execute him again, and in 2016 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled by four votes to three that another attempt would violate neither double-jeopardy protections nor the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Broom was never subjected to another execution. He died in prison in December 2020 after contracting COVID-19.
Doyle Hamm survived another attempted lethal injection in Alabama in 2018. Hamm was suffering from cancer, which had compromised his veins, and execution personnel spent around two and a half hours attempting to establish the necessary intravenous access before abandoning the procedure. Alabama later agreed not to attempt another execution, and Hamm remained imprisoned until his death from cancer in 2021.
These cases are generally described as botched executions. The phrase can make them sound like extraordinary accidents in an otherwise reliable system, but research suggests complications have occurred with surprising frequency. Legal scholar Austin Sarat examined 8,776 American executions carried out between 1890 and 2010 and classified 276 of them as botched, approximately 3.15 per cent. In his analysis, lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions.
The technology changed, but human beings remained unexpectedly difficult to kill.
Which brings us back to Christa Pike. Her case appears to differ from those of Broom and Hamm because their executions were abandoned when officials could not establish the intravenous access required to administer the lethal drugs. According to contemporary reporting, Pike received both sets of pentobarbital permitted by Tennessee’s protocol and survived. Why this happened is not yet known.
If Tennessee eventually seeks to execute Pike again, the case could revive an uncomfortable question that has followed capital punishment for centuries. How many attempts should the state be permitted?
This is not an argument that murderers should escape punishment. Colleen Slemmer was nineteen years old when she was murdered, and her family has lived with the consequences of that crime for more than three decades. Pike was convicted of an exceptionally serious offence, and nothing about surviving an execution attempt alters either the conviction or the crime.
The question is what legitimate punishment requires. A murderer sentenced to imprisonment for the remainder of their natural life is still being punished. They remain separated from society, deprived of their liberty and prevented from harming the public outside prison. Capital punishment goes further because its intended outcome is not incarceration but death.
Supporters of the death penalty have offered several reasons for that distinction, including retribution, deterrence, incapacitation and justice for victims and their families. Those arguments are not interchangeable. Incapacitation can also be achieved through permanent secure imprisonment.
The deterrence argument remains disputed. A major review by the US National Research Council concluded that existing research could not reliably determine whether capital punishment increases, decreases or has no effect on homicide rates. Importantly, the relevant comparison is not execution against no punishment at all. It is execution against alternatives such as life imprisonment without parole.
Retribution is different because it is ultimately a moral argument. If somebody deliberately takes another person’s life, some people believe that the appropriate punishment is the forfeiture of their own – an eye for an eye. Others believe that punishment should be severe and permanent without requiring the state to kill the offender. Neither position requires sympathy for the murderer.
Nor should the families of murder victims be treated as though they all hold one view. Some strongly support capital punishment while others oppose it. Grief does not automatically produce a particular opinion about what justice should look like.
Failed executions introduce an additional problem because the condemned prisoner has already undergone almost the entire process. They have received the execution date, been prepared for death, restrained and subjected to the mechanism intended to kill them. Only the intended biological outcome has failed.
That distinction mattered enormously in Willie Francis’s case. The American legal answer in 1947 was straightforward: Francis was still alive, therefore his death sentence had not been completed. Nearly eighty years later, Christa Pike may force courts to consider some version of that question again.
Her crime has not changed, nor has her conviction or the punishment imposed upon her. What has changed is that Tennessee has now attempted to carry it out twice.
There is no requirement to pretend that a convicted murderer is suddenly deserving of freedom because an execution fails. Life imprisonment remains an extraordinarily severe punishment, and a prisoner can remain securely incarcerated for the rest of their natural life. The more difficult question is whether another execution attempt achieves something that permanent imprisonment cannot.
Punishment certainly matters, and so does justice for the person who was murdered. However, punishment and justice are not necessarily measured by the number of times a government is prepared to attempt to kill somebody.
The strange history of execution survivors began long before Christa Pike. Anne Greene breathed when she should have been awaiting dissection. William Duell revived at Surgeons’ Hall. Maggie Dickson survived the gallows. Willie Francis survived Louisiana’s electric chair, while Romell Broom survived Ohio’s execution chamber. Some were pardoned, some remained imprisoned and some died naturally. Willie Francis was executed again.
Now another name has joined that peculiar list. Christa Pike survived the punishment that was supposed to end her life. She remains a convicted murderer and should remain subject to punishment for that crime, but the unresolved question is whether punishment now requires Tennessee to try to kill her again.
Perhaps surviving an execution should not mean freedom. Perhaps it should simply mean that the killing stops.
