Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has indicated that Christa Pike’s sentence will likely remain unchanged following a botched execution attempt last month. Pike, 50, was scheduled to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years on September 30, but she survived the procedure, becoming the first inmate in U.S. history to do so after a lethal injection.
"As it related to a particular individual like Christa Pike and her crime, she’s still incarcerated under the laws of the state of Tennessee," Lee stated. He added, “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
Pike was convicted in the 1980s of the murder of Colleen Slemmer, who she and her supporters lured to a shed where Pike stabbed her to death. Pike was also convicted of soliciting Slemmer's murder from the victim herself. The conviction was upheld by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1996. She has been on death row at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.