UN human rights chief and nine independent rights experts urge Tennessee to commute death sentence after botched execution

The UN human rights chief Volker Türk and nine independent rights experts have urged the US state of Tennessee not to make a new attempt to execute Christa Pike, who survived two lethal injection attempts. He said the suffering arising from failed executions was abhorrent and cruel.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent review and said on 1 October the investigation into Pike’s botched execution “will be thorough”, adding that “it’s going to take time”.

As reported by UN News, Türk pointed to unresolved questions surrounding Pike’s fair trial, saying they raised additional concerns about proceeding with another execution attempt.

“The state of Tennessee must immediately and irrevocably end this cruelty by commuting Christa Pike’s death sentence,” the experts said on Thursday.

“Not one but two botched execution attempts are a flagrant breach of the prohibition of torture and arbitrary deprivation of life and show why the death penalty should be prohibited everywhere,” they said.

The statements come amid what the UN office described as an increase in the number of executions in the United States, with the Pike case renewing attention to the human rights implications of capital punishment in the country, including safeguards for fair trials and the treatment of people subjected to repeated execution attempts.

BBC World Service reported that if the state of Tennessee had gotten its way, Chris Pike would have been the first woman to be put to death there in 200 years.

Last night, she was administered not one but two sets of lethal injections, which she somehow survived. Eventually, she was taken to the hospital.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who travelled to Tennessee to witness it, told NBC News after the botched attempt that “it was a mess”.

There is no update yet on her current medical condition or the next legal steps. But another execution planned in Tennessee for December has now been put on hold.

“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” her lawyer Randy Spivey told reporters on 1 October. “But we do know that she is alive right now.”

Christa Gail Pike (left) is pictured during her trial alongside her victim, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer

Her lawyers are now asking for her sentence to be commuted. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996. Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, BBC News reported.

This incident came after an earlier one in May this year had to be abandoned after prison officials couldn’t find a suitable vein for the injection.

Earlier, ZMINA reported that US President Donald Trump ordered the resumption of executions in Washington, DC in September 2025, which could lead to the reinstatement of the death penalty across the country.

Executions do not deter crime, as confirmed by research, but this remains a common argument among those who support killing as a method of punishment for crimes.

In Ukraine, the maximum penalty is life imprisonment, a system the government recently aligned with the recommendations of the European Court of Human Rights. From now on, a Ukrainian life sentence is no longer considered torture.

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