Tennessee Fails to Execute Christa Pike for Colleen Slemmer's Murder, Two Doses and She Survived, Governor Halts All 2026 Executions

0:03 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Thursday, October 1st, 2026. I need to tell you what happened in Nashville last night, and I'm going to do it carefully. Because the details matter, and because this is the kind of story that gets told badly. The state of Tennessee attempted to execute Krista Pike. It administered two doses of lethal injection drugs, which is the maximum its own protocol allows. She did not die. More than two hours after it began, she was taken out of that chamber by ambulance to a hospital. As of this recording, her lawyers say they have not been told her condition. And the governor of Tennessee has now halted every execution scheduled in that state this year. In Plymouth County, Judge William Sullivan is now weighing whether to throw out the case against Lindsay Clancy altogether, after her attorney told him there is a total and complete lack of evidence. And in Boston, four days before jury selection, a former police detective charged with murdering a pregnant 23-year-old is asking a federal judge to move his trial out of Massachusetts because he says the coverage has made a fair jury impossible. Let's get into it. Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old. She was a student in a Job Corps vocational program in Knoxville, Tennessee, trying to build a life.

1:34 In January of 1995, she was lured to a secluded spot near the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus and killed. Prosecutors described a prolonged torture killing. The details became notorious and I am not going to repeat them because you do not need them to understand anything that follows. Krista Pike was 18. Her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp was 17. A classmate Shadala Peterson was 18 and acted as a lookout. Pike was convicted in March of 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp got life with the possibility of parole. Peterson got probation for cooperating. In 2004, Pike was also convicted of attempting to murder another inmate. She has never denied what she did. In her clemency petition, she said she was a mentally ill 18-year-old, that it took years to understand the gravity of it, and that it sickens her to think she was capable of it. Yesterday, at age 50, after 30 years on death row, she was scheduled to die at 10 in the morning. Here is what actually happened over the next 11 hours. About an hour before that 10 o'clock time, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, two judges to one. Tennessee's Attorney General immediately asked the Supreme Court to lift it. Just before 6 in the evening, the Supreme Court vacated the stay.

2:57 The execution was back on. At 26 minutes past 7, the curtains to the execution chamber opened. Pike and her spiritual advisor sang a song together. She gave her final statement. Then the state administered pentobarbital. Media witnesses report that Pike said her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and that she kicked her feet repeatedly. At 20 minutes before eight, prison officials closed the curtain to the media room. They opened it again three minutes later. Witnesses could hear Pike breathing loudly. The curtain closed again at six minutes past eight, and witnesses say they could still hear her until the microphone was cut off at about 10 minutes before nine. She was given a second dose. Under Tennessee's protocol, two is the maximum. There is no provision for a third, and there is no provision for anything else. Her attorney, Kelly Gleason, told reporters her client was alive and snoring.

3:53 Her legal team filed emergency motions in two courts, arguing she had not lost consciousness, still had a heartbeat, and was in unnecessary agony, and that failing to provide her medical care amounted to deliberate indifference to a serious medical need. Federal Judge Clifton Corker then stated that medical personnel had begun to administer care. An ambulance arrived at Riverbend. Krista Pike was transported to an off-site medical facility. Her lawyers say they still have not been told how she is. Now, let me do the part that matters, which is the part underneath the horror. Pike's attorneys had warned about this specifically. In court filings and at a hearing in Knoxville last month, they argued she has a blood disorder that affects clotting, that her veins are difficult to access, and that this created a substantial risk of a prolonged and painful execution.

4:45 The state disputed it. A hematologist testified for the state that her recent medical records showed her veins were accessible and that staff had completed nearly all recent blood draws with a single needle stick. A senior judge concluded the evidence did not show a substantial risk of severe pain. After last night, her attorneys released a statement saying the state of Tennessee had once again failed to carry out a lawful execution. They listed what they said went wrong. Difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available, and a protocol they described as veiled in secrecy. They said they took no pleasure in being right. The Department of Corrections' position is that it followed every step of the state's lawful, established protocol, which was approved by the Attorney General's Office, that the chemical has consistently been effective and that the protocol does not allow for anything beyond what was done.

5:41 Read those two statements together, because they are not actually in conflict. The state is saying it followed the protocol. The defense is saying the protocol is the problem. And there is context that makes this worse. Four months ago, Tennessee called off the execution of Tony Carruthers when personnel could not establish a backup IV line. According to reporting, the same doctor who oversaw that attempt was in charge last night. Before that, Tennessee had already paused executions for three years after an investigation found officials had not been properly testing lethal injection drugs for purity and potency. They resumed only recently. This morning, Governor Bill Lee paused every execution scheduled in Tennessee for the rest of this year and called for a comprehensive review. He said carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the state's most serious responsibilities.

6:34 and that people expect it to be done in a way that is not only legal and constitutional, but effective. A reporter who has witnessed several Tennessee executions said nothing about yesterday was normal or typical at all. Here is my honest read, and I'm going to try to say it without picking a side on capital punishment itself, because that is not. What this is about. Whatever you believe the state should be permitted to do to Krista Pike, everyone across the entire spectrum of this argument agrees on one thing. If a government is going to kill a person, it has an absolute obligation to do it competently. That is not a pro-death penalty position or an anti-death penalty position. The Eighth Amendment does not prohibit executions. It prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. And a two-hour procedure that ends with a conscious person being taken to a hospital is the thing that provision was written about.

7:30 There is also the question nobody has a good answer to. What happens now? She survived. She is in a hospital being treated by doctors so that the state can, at some later date, try again. There is no body of. Law that cleanly resolves that because it is not supposed to happen. And then there is the other person in this. May Martinez, Colleen Slemmer's mother, has waited 30 years. She traveled to that prison. Strangers helped pay for the trip. She sat through a morning stay, an afternoon of appeals, a Supreme Court order, and then whatever last night actually was. She did not get an execution. She did not get a reprieve. She got two hours of chaos and a daughter who is still dead.

8:14 Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old. Someone has to say her name, and I notice how rarely it has appeared in anything written about last night. When we come back, a judge considers throwing the Clancy case out entirely. Cora Clancy was five. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. On Tuesday, their mother was back in Plymouth Superior Court for the first time since her trial ended in a mistrial. And we covered that hearing yesterday. No trial date. No decision from the district attorney. Next hearing, November 2nd. But there is one piece of that hearing I want to come back to because Court TV is reporting it as a live question rather than a formality. And if it goes the defense's way, there is no second trial at all. Kevin Reddington argued a motion for a required finding of not guilty. His position, in his words, is that there was a total and complete lack of evidence and that the Commonwealth cannot establish probable cause. Judge Sullivan is weighing it. Now, let me explain what that motion actually is, because it is not the same as the double jeopardy motion and people are conflating them. A required finding asked the judge to rule that the evidence was legally insufficient. Not that the jury got it wrong. That no reasonable jury, looking at what the Commonwealth put on, could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It is usually made at the close of

9:46 the state's case, and it is usually denied, because the standard requires a judge to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution. And here is the wrinkle that makes this case unusual. Lindsay Clarkson. Has never disputed that she killed her children. The contested element was criminal responsibility. And in Massachusetts, the burden on that sits with the Commonwealth. So Reddington's argument is essentially this. Every expert who testified on both sides agreed she was seriously mentally ill. the Commonwealth had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was nonetheless criminally responsible. And 11 of 12 jurors concluded it had not. If a judge agrees the proof was insufficient as a matter of law, the case ends. And unlike a mistrial, that ruling would function as an acquittal. I want to be clear that this is still a long shot. Judges rarely grant these, and Sullivan sat through five weeks of testimony, including three prosecution experts, who said she was criminally responsible. That is evidence a reasonable jury could credit, which is normally the end of the analysis. But he is weighing it, and he has not ruled, along with a pending motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds and a pending motion about the holdout juror's phone records. So Tim Cruz is deciding whether to retry a case that a judge may take away from him entirely. That is not a normal posture.

11:15 And it may explain why, 26 days after the mistrial, his office is still saying it is doing its due diligence. November 2nd. Someone has to say their names. When we come back, a former detective says there is nowhere in Massachusetts he can get a fair trial. Sandra Birchmore was 23 years old. She was pregnant. She was found dead in her apartment in Canton, Massachusetts in February of 2021. And her death was initially ruled a suicide. In August of 2024, federal prosecutors charged a former Stoughton police detective named Matthew Farwell with killing her.

12:07 The allegation is that Farwell met Birchmore through a police explorer's program for young people. that he began a sexual relationship with her when she was a teenager, and that he killed her in 2021 and staged her death to look like a suicide to stop her from disclosing what he had done. Farwell has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and he is presumed innocent. His defense maintains that Sandra Birchmore took her own life. They point to her mental health history, to disagreement about the cause of death, and to DNA. Evidence, they say, shows he was not the father of her unborn child. Prosecutors announced last December they will not seek the death penalty. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in federal court in Boston. And on Monday of this week, his attorneys filed a motion asking Chief Judge Denise Casper to move the entire trial out of Massachusetts.

13:01 This is their second attempt. In January, they asked her to move it to Rhode Island, arguing jurors there would not have been saturated by Boston media. She denied it, finding the nature and volume of coverage had not risen to a level that would warrant a change of venue. Now they are back, arguing it has gotten worse. Attorney Kimberly Stevens wrote that the volume and tenor of local publicity create a reasonable likelihood that pretrial coverage has prevented and will continue to prevent a fair trial. They argue routine filings and hearings have generated commentary that simply assumes his guilt and calls for punishment without a trial. They also make a point I had not considered. They note that jurors have to go back and live in these communities afterward. Prosecutors oppose it, and when they opposed the first motion, they pointed to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, whose venue motion was denied in the same district.

13:58 That is a powerful precedent, and it is also a complicated one, because the First Circuit later vacated Tsarnaev's death sentence partly over jury selection issues before the Supreme Court reinstated it. Look, I want to take this argument seriously because we have spent a month on this show watching what publicity does to a jury. We watched 12 people in Plymouth County get identified, interviewed, accused, and in one case, doxxed and driven from his home. We watched a defense attorney demand a juror's phone records and a juror hire a lawyer and raise $ 300, 000 for security. So when a defense lawyer says the environment in Massachusetts right now makes a fair jury hard to seat, That is not a frivolous thing to say. It is the thing we have been documenting, and the counter-argument is just as real. Venue transfers are rare because the remedy for publicity is normally careful jury selection, not moving a federal trial hundreds of miles from where a victim lived and where her family would have to travel to attend. Courts assume jurors can set aside what they have heard because if they cannot, no notorious case could ever be tried anywhere. Casper has to decide that in the next few days. One more thing, and it is the thing that will get lost. Sandra Birchmore was 12 years old when she joined that Explorers program.

15:19 She was 23 when she died, and she was pregnant. Everything in the news this week is about where her alleged killer's trial should be held. She is the reason there is a trial at all. Someone has to say her name. That's the show for Thursday, October 1st. If you listen on Apple, look at the top of your screen for the button that says listen uninterrupted. $ 5 a month, no ads, thousands of shows across Calaroga media and 30 days free if you want to try it. Everyone who already subscribes, thank you. And on Spotify, drop a comment on the Tennessee case. An execution was stopped an hour before it happened, and the question the court is deciding is essentially which kind of legal filing it was. Should a procedural category ever be the thing that decides whether somebody lives? Jury selection in the Farwell case begins Monday in Boston. The Supreme Court could rule on the Tennessee stay at any hour. And the Clancy case is back in Plymouth County on November 2nd. I'm Garrett Fisher.

16:25 Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Tennessee case, Krista Pike was convicted and sentenced to death, and those convictions stand. The stay is temporary and was granted two to one, with one judge dissenting. The Tennessee Attorney General has asked the United States Supreme Court to lift it, and as of recording, no ruling had been issued. Nothing in the stay is a finding that her claims are meritorious. The court said only that it needed time to analyze them. On the Massachusetts case, no rulings were issued at Tuesday's hearing. The motion for a required finding, the motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, and the motion concerning the juror's phone records are all pending and undecided. Lindsay Clancy has not been convicted or acquitted of anything. On the federal case in Boston, Matthew Farwell has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. And the allegations described are the government's and have not been proven.

17:24 His defense maintains Sandra Birchmore's death was a suicide. The venue motion is pending. Prosecutors have said they will not seek the death penalty. This episode discusses the death penalty, child sexual abuse, suicide, and the deaths of children. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If you have experienced sexual violence, the National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 1-800-656-4673.