Kit Thomas did not describe herself as shocked when Christa Pike survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her.
She used a different word.
“Foreseen.”
For Thomas, a capital defense attorney who has spent years litigating death penalty cases in Tennessee, what happened inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on September 30, 2026, was not simply an inexplicable medical disaster.
It was the kind of disaster she says lawyers had warned state officials could happen.
Long before Pike was strapped to an execution gurney.
Long before witnesses heard her complain that her arm was throbbing.
Long before the first dose of pentobarbital failed to kill her.
And long before Tennessee administered a second dose only to discover that Pike was still breathing.
“I’m horrified about what Christa Pike experienced, and I’m not surprised at all,” Thomas told WVLT after the failed execution.
“These concerns were not just foreseeable, they were foreseen.”
That distinction has become central to the rapidly expanding controversy surrounding Tennessee’s execution system.
A failed execution can be dismissed as an isolated malfunction.
A predicted failure raises a different question.
Were warning signs already visible before anyone entered the death chamber?
Thomas believes they were.
Tennessee officials say the state followed its established protocol during Pike’s execution attempt.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent investigation to determine exactly what went wrong.
The findings of that investigation remain pending.
But the documented history preceding Pike’s execution reveals why lawyers such as Thomas are now arguing that the September 30 disaster should not be viewed as an isolated night of bad luck.
It came after years of concerns involving lethal injection drugs, execution-team training, IV access, secrecy and Tennessee’s ability to follow its own procedures.
And Pike was not even the first condemned prisoner in Tennessee to survive an execution attempt in 2026.
Five months earlier, the state attempted to execute Tony Carruthers.
That procedure never reached the drug-administration stage.
Execution personnel successfully established one IV but repeatedly failed to place the required secondary line.
They tried his arm.
They tried his hand.
They tried his foot.
They eventually attempted a central line.
After prolonged efforts, the execution was abandoned.
Carruthers remained alive.
Then came Pike.
This time, Tennessee succeeded in establishing what officials believed were usable IV lines.
The execution proceeded.
Pentobarbital was administered.
According to witnesses and Pike’s attorneys, the first dose failed to kill her.
A backup set of syringes was prepared.
A second lethal dose was administered.
Pike still did not die.
Witnesses described hearing heavy breathing and loud snoring long after the injections.
Pike’s attorneys said she had complained that her arm felt as though it might burst open.
They later alleged that execution personnel had attempted IV placement with at least seven needles.
When Pike eventually reached a Nashville-area hospital, her legal team said both arms were swollen, burned and blistered.
She was unconscious, intubated and dependent on a ventilator.
The Tennessee Department of Correction offered a very different description of its own conduct.
In an official statement issued after the execution attempt, the department said it had “followed every step” of Tennessee’s lawful execution protocol.
It said the lethal injection chemical had been consistently effective and explained that the written protocol authorized no additional procedure beyond what officials had already performed.
Pike was therefore removed from the prison and transported to a medical facility.
That statement created the paradox now hanging over Tennessee’s death penalty system.
The department says the protocol was followed.
The person the protocol was designed to kill survived.
For Thomas, that contradiction is not evidence that the written procedure worked.
It is evidence that something deeper deserves examination.
Thomas serves as deputy chief of the Capital Habeas Unit in the Federal Public Defender’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Her unit represents condemned prisoners in federal habeas proceedings and constitutional litigation challenging execution procedures.
In March 2025, lawyers from the office sued Tennessee over its revised lethal injection process.
According to Thomas, portions of that lawsuit warned about precisely the type of IV-access problems Tennessee would later encounter.
“There are paragraphs of our lawsuit that have literally come true,” she told WVLT.
The lawyers feared condemned prisoners could spend prolonged periods strapped to a gurney while personnel struggled to establish reliable intravenous access.
Carruthers, Thomas argues, experienced exactly that scenario.
Pike’s execution then raised an even more consequential concern.
What happens when officials believe they have established IV access, but the line is not actually functioning correctly?
Pike’s attorneys allege that this is what occurred.
Their emergency court filing claims her IV lines were improperly positioned or failed during the execution.
According to their account, at least some of the pentobarbital entered surrounding tissue instead of flowing effectively through her bloodstream.
Rather than recognizing and correcting that problem, they allege, officials administered a second lethal dose through the compromised setup.
Those allegations have not yet been adopted as findings by Tennessee’s independent investigation.
TDOC has maintained that its written protocol was followed.
An outside medical expert retained by Pike’s defense has offered a similar possible explanation.
Anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot said the IV catheters may have failed, allowing the highly alkaline pentobarbital to leak into Pike’s tissue.
That could potentially explain both the serious arm injuries described by her attorneys and why a sufficient quantity of the drug may not have reached her circulation.
Zivot has emphasized that this remains his medical assessment rather than an official conclusion about the execution.
Thomas has also been careful about what is not yet known.
She has raised possible vein extravasation, meaning the drug escaped the blood vessel, as one explanation.
She has also said drug degradation should be investigated.
But she described those possibilities explicitly as speculation requiring further evidence.
“We need to know more,” she told WVLT.
For Thomas, however, the controversy began before the drugs entered Pike’s body.
One of her central criticisms concerns the qualifications Tennessee requires from people responsible for establishing IV lines during executions.
Thomas argues that Tennessee’s revised 2025 protocol contains standards so broad that individuals with relatively limited training could potentially qualify for the execution IV team.
She illustrated her criticism starkly.
Under her reading of the rules, she said she could complete a short phlebotomy course and potentially satisfy the state’s qualification standard.
That is Thomas’s characterization of the protocol, but it speaks to a larger problem associated with lethal injection nationwide.
Executions resemble medical procedures.
They require veins.
Catheters.
Syringes.
Drug calculations.
Physiological monitoring.
Yet the medical profession presents states with a fundamental complication.
Many physicians consider direct participation in executions incompatible with medical ethics.
University of Richmond law professor Corinna Lain, who has studied lethal injection, told the Associated Press that only a small number of licensed doctors nationwide work with states in executions.
That can leave corrections departments attempting to perform procedures involving difficult IV access without the kind of clinical personnel normally associated with complex intravenous care.
Tennessee had confronted a related problem before.
In 2022, Governor Bill Lee abruptly stopped the scheduled execution of Oscar Smith because officials discovered that required testing of the lethal injection chemicals had not been properly completed.
Lee then suspended executions and commissioned an independent investigation led by former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton.
That investigation produced troubling findings.
According to the later state announcement and reporting on the report, Tennessee had repeatedly failed to comply fully with its own lethal injection procedures.
Required drug testing had not always occurred.
Execution practices did not consistently match the written protocol.
The unidentified executioner used by Tennessee had no formal healthcare training and had largely learned the role through experience.
Lee responded by ordering leadership changes, revisions to the lethal injection protocol and new training procedures.
The goal was explicitly corrective.
The state said it intended to rebuild confidence in the execution process.
Frank Strada became commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction in January 2023.
By December 2024, the department announced that its review was complete.
Tennessee would move away from the previous three-drug procedure and adopt a single-drug pentobarbital protocol.
Strada publicly expressed confidence in the new system.
“I am confident the lethal injection process can proceed in compliance with departmental policy and state laws,” he said at the time.
Less than two years later, Tennessee had experienced two failed execution attempts.
For Thomas, this history matters because the revised system was supposed to be the solution.
She argues instead that some of the most dangerous weaknesses remained.
Her criticism has focused particularly on IV-team training.
Thomas says Tennessee’s newer guidelines eliminated an earlier requirement involving actual practice placing catheters during execution drills.
Under revised training rules cited by Thomas, the person role-playing the prisoner does not receive an actual IV during the exercise.
She argues that removing hands-on catheter practice is especially significant because reliable IV placement has now been at the center of both Tennessee execution failures in 2026.
Thomas also points to Commissioner Strada’s previous experience in Arizona.
Before leading Tennessee’s correctional system, Strada served in senior leadership with the Arizona Department of Corrections.
Arizona conducted several executions involving prolonged attempts to locate or establish veins while Strada held a leadership role there.
Afterward, Arizona revised aspects of its lethal injection system, including IV-team staffing and training requirements.
Thomas argues that Tennessee subsequently adopted procedures resembling portions of Arizona’s earlier approach.
“Frank Strada was hired to clean up a broken lethal injection system in Tennessee,” Thomas said, “and he brought with him the problems from Arizona.”
That is a defense attorney’s assessment, not an independent finding of misconduct by Strada.
Strada defended Tennessee’s handling of Pike’s execution and said he believed the department followed the approved protocol.
But on October 3, three days after Pike survived the lethal injection, Governor Lee announced that Strada would resign.
Strada said stepping aside was in the public interest while questions surrounding the execution were investigated.
The resignation intensified scrutiny of a system that had already undergone one major independent investigation four years earlier.
And that history has created another of Thomas’s central questions.
What is the value of an independent investigation if recommendations from the previous investigation are not fully implemented?
Thomas pointed to testimony given by Strada in a November 2025 deposition.
According to material she provided to reporters, Strada acknowledged that Tennessee had not implemented certain recommendations from the 2022 review.
Among them, Thomas said, was a recommendation to hire a full-time employee or consultant with pharmaceutical expertise to assist with lethal injection operations.
Another involved securing specialized assistance in obtaining lethal injection drugs.
Thomas argues that these omissions deserve renewed attention now that the state is again investigating its execution system.
Tennessee’s history with execution drugs helps explain why.
The 2022 review found problems with required testing of chemicals used in previous lethal injections.
The report found that required endotoxin testing was not performed in several cases, while one execution involved midazolam that had not received required potency testing.
Those findings prompted Lee to acknowledge significant operational failures and order corrective changes.
The new single-drug protocol was intended to simplify matters.
Pentobarbital replaced the earlier three-drug combination.
Supporters of the change argued that a single drug reduced complexity and that pentobarbital had been used successfully in executions elsewhere.
Tennessee’s Department of Correction continues to state publicly that pentobarbital has been consistently effective.
But Pike’s case demonstrates that the chemical itself is only one component.
Even a drug capable of causing death cannot work as intended if it does not reach the bloodstream correctly.
That returns the controversy to training.
And veins.
And personnel.
And the difference between a written protocol and what happens to a human body on the gurney.
Critics also point to secrecy.
Tennessee, like many death penalty states, keeps the identities of execution-team members confidential.
Certain details regarding drug procurement and execution procedures are also shielded from public disclosure.
Supporters of confidentiality laws argue that they protect execution personnel and drug suppliers from harassment, threats or pressure campaigns.
Critics such as Thomas counter that secrecy prevents meaningful outside scrutiny of qualifications, preparation and accountability.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction is operating behind a veil of secrecy,” Thomas told WVLT.
“There is no public accountability.”
The debate does not divide neatly between supporters and opponents of capital punishment.
Some Tennessee officials who support the death penalty have also questioned the execution process.
Republican state Sen. Joey Hensley, a physician, told the Associated Press that Tennessee may need better-trained people carrying out executions, particularly when prisoners present difficult vascular access.
His criticism focused on execution competence rather than opposition to capital punishment itself.
Governor Lee has likewise maintained support for the death penalty while insisting that executions must be performed correctly.
When he ordered the 2022 investigation, Lee explicitly said he considered capital punishment appropriate for heinous crimes but expected TDOC to eliminate doubts that its procedures were being properly followed.
After Pike survived, he again suspended executions and ordered an independent review.
That distinction matters because the question now confronting Tennessee is not only whether the state should have a death penalty.
It is also whether Tennessee can reliably administer the punishment already authorized by its laws.
Pike’s crime remains central to that debate.
She was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
The killing was brutal, and Slemmer’s family spent more than three decades waiting for the sentence imposed on Pike to be carried out.
Her mother, May Martinez, traveled to witness the execution.
Instead, she watched another failed procedure connected to her daughter’s death.
For Slemmer’s family, failures in the execution system do not erase the original victim.
They create another delay in a case that has already lasted most of their adult lives.
That perspective is essential when evaluating claims that Tennessee’s system has failed.
An execution system can fail condemned prisoners through unnecessary suffering.
It can also fail victims’ families by repeatedly promising a final legal conclusion and then being unable to deliver it.
Pike’s case managed to expose both possibilities simultaneously.
Tennessee intended to execute her.
Pike survived with catastrophic injuries alleged by her attorneys.
Slemmer’s family left Riverbend without the resolution they had expected.
The Department of Correction entered another investigation.
Executions were paused again.
And the commissioner appointed after the previous investigation resigned.
Thomas believes that sequence demonstrates something larger than a single botched injection.
She sees a pattern.
In 2022, Tennessee stopped an execution because required drug-testing procedures had not been followed.
An independent investigation found repeated failures to comply with protocol.
A new commissioner was installed.
The protocol was rewritten.
Training procedures changed.
Then, in May 2026, Tennessee could not establish the IV access required to execute Tony Carruthers.
Four months later, the state placed IV lines in Christa Pike, administered pentobarbital twice and still failed to execute her.
Those events are why Thomas argues that Tennessee should no longer treat each failure as a separate technical problem.
Her position is that the repeated breakdowns point to institutional weaknesses involving qualifications, training, oversight and transparency.
Tennessee officials have not accepted that conclusion.
The state maintains that the Pike execution team followed the approved protocol.
The exact mechanism of the failure remains under investigation.
The independent review could ultimately identify a narrower technical cause, broader procedural failures, or some combination of both.
Until that review is finished, claims about precisely who was responsible and exactly why Pike survived remain unresolved.
But the historical record is already difficult to ignore.
Tennessee reviewed its lethal injection system once before.
It identified serious failures.
It promised reforms.
It rewrote the procedure.
Then two executions failed within months of each other.
That is the factual foundation beneath Thomas’s criticism.
And it is why her argument goes beyond what happened to Christa Pike on one night.
The deeper question is whether Tennessee’s execution process can convert a written protocol into a procedure that is consistently controlled, technically reliable and compliant with constitutional requirements.
The state says it intends to find out.
Thomas argues that lawyers have already been telling officials where to look.
At the training requirements.
At the IV teams.
At the history of failed catheter placements.
At the qualifications of personnel.
At the execution drugs.
At the recommendations made after the last investigation.
And at the secrecy surrounding the people responsible for carrying everything out.
For Thomas, the most disturbing part of September 30 was not merely that the execution failed.
It was that she believes Tennessee had already been warned about the conditions that could make such a failure possible.
The next investigation will determine whether that argument survives the evidence.
Until then, one fact remains beyond dispute.
Tennessee redesigned its lethal injection system because officials said the old one needed correction.
Two years later, Christa Pike received two lethal doses of pentobarbital.
She survived.
And Tennessee is investigating its execution system all over again.
