Pike, 50, became the only prisoner in modern times to survive a full dose of a lethal injection drug when her execution on 30 September was called off after she remained alive, making snoring and choking sounds. She spent 10 days in hospital before being returned to prison in Nashville, and can now talk and walk, though her long-term prognosis remains unknown.
In a declaration released as part of separate legal proceedings, Spivey gives a minute-by-minute account in which the IV team used up to 10 needles over nearly an hour. About 20 minutes into the attempt, team members began discussing whether the vein "might be blowing". Two unidentified members poked the insertion site and both said they "can't tell" whether the line had been established. "One of them said something like: 'It's either blood or blown, I need to know,'" the account says.
The team discarded a needle as too short, at one point believed it had established a line only to find it was not working, and pulled a severely bent needle from Pike's left arm. At 7.13pm, a team member told Pike they "have it", and the injection began. At 7.34pm Pike cried out: "I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns."
The account lends weight to the theory that the pentobarbital was diverted into the tissue of Pike's arm rather than her bloodstream, which would explain her survival and severe injuries. A full dose in her bloodstream would almost certainly have been fatal.
The declaration is attached to a new legal motion filed on behalf of Tony Carruthers, a death row prisoner who also survived an attempted execution in Tennessee on 21 May after the team failed to find a vein for more than 30 minutes. Carruthers's lawyers are seeking permission from the Davidson county chancery court to file a supplemental complaint challenging the state's lethal injection protocol, after an initial March 2025 complaint warned that the administering team was "incompetent, insufficiently trained, insufficiently dedicated to doing their jobs, and/or insufficiently attentive".
"The specific failures that Mr Carruthers and Ms Pike endured were predicted, in detail and at length," the motion states. Kit Thomas, an attorney for the death row plaintiffs, said the Tennessee Department of Correction and the Attorney General's Office had "doubled down on secrecy" instead of addressing the problems. "The result was just as we predicted: extreme pain and suffering for our clients, in botched execution attempts that also inflicted lasting harm on victims' families, corrections staff, and media witnesses, among others."
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her friend Colleen Slemmer, committed when she was 18, and spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement. The failed execution prompted Republican Governor Bill Lee to call off all executions in Tennessee pending a review.