Before Christa Pike, Tennessee Botched the Executions of These Black Men

When Byron Black cried out in excruciating distress during his 2025 lethal injection, it exposed a chilling preview of what some called state-sanctioned chemical torture. Now, following Christa Pike’s failed execution, critics are calling out the state of Tennessee’s terrifying, systemic pattern of botched executions, the morality of capital punishment, and the psychological damage left in its wake.

Christa Pike is in critical condition and is undergoing medical care to now save her life after she received two lethal injections of pentobarbital—a short acting sedative that causes death by respiratory arrest in high doses—at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution Wednesday, in a botched execution. However, her chaotic, unsuccessful execution is far from unique in Tennessee, becoming the state’s second flubbed execution this year alone.

The attempted execution of Tony Carruthers—a Black man who was convicted of killing three people in 1994—had to be called off after executioners tried and failed to find a suitable backup vein in both of his arms and then in his feet for over an hour on May 21, the Associated Press reported.

After efforts to insert a central line through his collarbone and shoulder were also unsuccessful, state officials eventually called off the execution—but only after witnesses said they heard him “wincing and groaning” and saw “a lot of blood.” Calling the attempt “horrible” to witness, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Maria DeLiberato and the organization condemned the ordeal as flat-out “torturous.” Gov. Bill Lee later granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve, NPR reported.

Most chillingly, WSMV 4 revealed that both inmates survived their botched executions under the supervision of the exact same state physician contractor: Mark Fowler. According to reporting from the New York Times, legal experts and critics have long sounded the alarm over the questionable qualifications of Nashville prison officials, medical personnel, and execution staff, alongside lingering doubts regarding the efficacy of the state’s lethal drugs.

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Reports of systemic incompetence were laid bare once again at the very same Nashville facility during the harrowing ordeals of both Pike and Carruthers, following the August 2025 botched execution of another Black man, Byron Black.

Despite having a heart implant—with a defibrillation function that could shock him as he died—Black “unexpectedly and repeatedly groaned during his injections” over the course of several minutes, the Death Penalty Information Center reported. The intellectually disabled 69-year-old, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two daughters in 1989, complained to his spiritual advisor: “It’s hurting so bad.”

An autopsy released September 10, 2025, found evidence of ​“pulmonary congestion and edema,” a condition in which a person’s lungs fill with fluid, creating the feeling of suffocation or drowning that some experts have compared to waterboarding. That abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs can produce sensations of ​“doom, panic, drowning, and asphyxiation” according to Dr. Mark Edgar, a pathologist and autopsy director at the Mayo Clinic in Florida—who assessed approximately three-quarters of prisoners who were executed had endured the exact same sensation of suffocating panic.

As the disturbing pattern of botched executions in Tennessee increases, some Republican state senators called for a hold on all executions to overhaul an “incompetent administration.” However, Gov. Bill Lee declined.

“The Department of Correction did exactly what they should. It should not affect executions in the future,” Gov. Lee said, NPR reported. “It’s one of the most difficult things that we do in this state. But I am committed to making sure that it is done in the way that it should be.”