WASHINGTON: An unprecedented botched execution that left a female murderer alive after two lethal injections triggered international calls on Thursday for the US state of Tennessee to abandon capital punishment.

Christa Pike, 50, was taken to a hospital after the failed attempts to put her to death on Wednesday night. Her condition was not known, and Tennessee officials have not said how she survived the deadly doses of pentobarbital.

“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told The New York Times. “There is no precedent.”

UN rights chief Volker Turk on Thursday urged Tennessee not to make a new attempt to execute Pike. “The case of Christa Pike lays bare multiple reasons why the death penalty should be abolished,” his office said on X.

“The prolonged suffering — physical and mental — arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel. And there are key fair trial questions still unresolved.” Pike’s lawyers said in a statement that their arguments against the execution had come to pass: “difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”

‘Loudly snoring’

Pike’s case had already attracted scrutiny in the lead-up to her execution date, as she would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Kim Chandler, a media witness, told CBS News that “Pike appeared notably awake as the execution began” at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

“A couple of times she looked around the room. At one point she looked towards prison officials and asked if it was supposed to feel that way,” Chandler said. Pike later began snoring, witnesses said.

“We just listened… to her snoring and making very loud breathing sounds for almost an hour,” said Catherine Sweeney of WPLN television. The condemned woman was “loudly snoring, clearly very alive” as the journalists were ushered out of the area, Chandler told CBS. During a livestream, an ambulance with its lights flashing could be seen leaving the prison. It was un­­­­­­c­­lear if it was transporting Pike.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2026