Lawyers for Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal drug in Tennessee’s death chamber last week, asked the state on Monday to spare her life as she lay on a ventilator.

Steve Ferrell, of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, [told “CBS Mornings”](<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christa-pike-attorneys-push-commuted-sentence-botched-execution-take-death-off-the-table/>) that Ms. Pike was in critical condition and that it was still unclear whether she would wake up. Hospital staff were still working to clear pentobarbital from her body, he said. Gov. Bill Lee turned down a request to commute her sentence to life in prison before the execution. Her lawyers are making it again.

“The least that could happen now is that we at least take death off the table and start looking for what the future could be for her,” Mr. Ferrell said. He said the legal team was “certainly willing to discuss that with the governor, with whoever could make that decision.”

Even if she recovers, he said, “It may still be a long time before she’s able to participate in the legal process.” Prisoners who have lived through botched executions have historically been put back on the schedule, and Mr. Ferrell said the commutation request was meant to keep that from happening to Ms. Pike.

The attempt took place on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The execution team spent an hour trying to give her the drugs, and Randy Spivey, another of her lawyers, counted at least seven needles in her left arm, [PBS NewsHour reported](<https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/christa-pike-on-a-ventilator-and-unconscious-after-failed-tennessee-execution-attorneys-say>). Neither the first dose nor the backup worked.

In a court filing on Friday, her lawyers said they believed faulty IV lines had sent the drug into her body instead of her bloodstream. “At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed,” they wrote, and said the team gave a second dose rather than fix the problem.

At least seven American prisoners, Tony Carruthers among them, have survived lethal injections that failed because of IV problems. Ms. Pike is different because the drugs actually went in. “That fact alone tells us that something went seriously wrong in the execution chamber,” Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told CBS News on Friday. “It is an unprecedented event in the modern death penalty era.”

Mr. Lee has canceled the state’s last execution scheduled for this year and [ordered a third-party review](<https://abcnews.com/US/execution-lone-woman-tennessees-death-row-paused-federal/story?id=136893331>). At a briefing, he told reporters that “so far as we know, the Department of Correction followed exactly the protocol as outlined.” The department’s commissioner, Frank Strada, has stepped down. Some Republican lawmakers have said the state should rethink single-drug lethal injection, PBS reported.

The state has been here before. In April 2022, it called off the execution of Oscar Smith and paused executions. A review led by Ed Stanton, a former federal prosecutor, found that Tennessee hadn’t followed its own lethal injection protocol since 2018. Executions resumed in 2025, and the state carried out three with pentobarbital alone, replacing the three-drug mix it had used. Earlier this year, staff called off the execution of Mr. Carruthers after they couldn’t set an IV line.

Ms. Pike, who was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, has spent three decades in prison, mostly in isolation. She was 18 in 1995 when she killed Colleen Slemmer, 19, a former classmate. “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend,” she wrote in her clemency petition.

May Martinez, Ms. Slemmer’s mother, said on Thursday: “I didn’t get justice for my daughter.”

In the days before the execution, Ms. Pike said she was “nervous about the process,” and her lawyers had raised the same concerns in their appeals. After the injection failed, Mr. Ferrell said in a statement, “All of this was predicted, and the court did nothing.”