Tennessee governor halts executions after second botched lethal injection attempt this year
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Tennessee governor Bill Lee has halted the state’s remaining executions for the rest of the year after officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death yesterday.
Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.
She had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Governor Lee said that he was halting the one remaining execution for the rest of 2026 and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution. In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.
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Trump’s travel on Thursday to Texas and Oklahoma kicks off what the president said will be a 32-day campaign blitz, AP reported. Vance will be stumping in Florida, putting the Republican party’s highest-ranking officials in areas where GOP candidates once expected to have glide paths to victory but are now facing tougher races.
Republicans have expressed growing pessimism about their chances in the election, which will determine control of Congress, as the president has repeatedly dismissed concerns about high costs and gas prices as his unpopular war in Iran drags on.
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In a letter seen by the Guardian and addressed to Alex Adams, assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), senators led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts argue that federal cuts and changes to childcare programs like Head Start are destabilising an already fragile system.
Childcare costs rose faster than overall inflation in 2025, the letter notes, while the cost of daycare and preschool increased by 3.5% in the year to May 2026.
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Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate three decades ago, survived Tennessee’s effort to execute her by means of an unprecedented two lethal injections, prison officials said.
This was the state’s first attempted execution of a woman in 200 years. “At one point … she said, ‘my arm feels like it’s about to burst open’,” said Tori Gessner, a news anchor for ABC affiliate WKRN, who witnessed the attempted execution, before adding “then she smiles really big”.
Other journalists present described Pike snoring, exhaling loudly and gasping.
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Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, the candidates running to be California’s next governor, clashed Wednesday over taxes, immigration and regulating artificial intelligence in a testy debate held days before voters begin receiving their ballots in the heavily Democratic state.
Hilton, the former Fox News host endorsed by Donald Trump, used the hourlong matchup, hosted by CNN, to argue that Becerra, a former congressman who served as health and human services secretary during the Biden administration, was not actively campaigning and instead taking voters for granted.
“He wasn’t even supposed to be the candidate,” Hilton, 57, said, referring to Becerra’s unexpected success after an unusually wild primary campaign. “I just want to ask every Californian: Aren’t you tired of that?”
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Between 2021 and 2024, the justice department’s election threats taskforce prosecuted 21 cases, like that of Solomon Peña, a failed candidate for the New Mexico house of representatives who organized shootings at the houses of election officials, or Quintez Brown, who shot up a campaign meeting of Louisville’s mayor.
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Since then, the taskforce seems to have gone quiet.
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Tennessee governor halts executions after second botched lethal injection attempt this year
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Tennessee governor Bill Lee has halted the state’s remaining executions for the rest of the year after officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death yesterday.
Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.
She had been scheduled for execution at 10am on Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Governor Lee said that he was halting the one remaining execution for the rest of 2026 and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution. In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.
In other developments:
-
The latest in a series of pro-Trump ads the Trump administration is using taxpayer funds to air on television in the run-up to the the midterm elections is a 1-minute spot that celebrates his decision to go to war with Iran.
-
Pete Hegseth announced that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, with Palmer Luckey, CEO of the defense tech company Anduril, and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House.
-
An internal watchdog said the Federal Reserve mismanaged costs associated with a $2.4bn renovation of its Washington DC headquarters, but noted that no criminal violations occurred, according to a report released Wednesday.
-
Trump said South Korea plans to invest about $54bn in a natural gas project in Alaska.
-
Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, the candidates running to be California’s next governor, clashed Wednesday over taxes, immigration and regulating artificial intelligence in a testy debate held days before voters begin receiving their ballots in the heavily Democratic state.
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