Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike says she is in constant pain and isolated after surviving her botched execution

Dr. Mark Fowler, 69, the execution physician who waited in an anteroom while Christa Pike survived two doses of lethal injection on 30 September, has broken his silence — saying he is willing to personally finish the job and comparing his readiness to do so to Jesus's willingness to sacrifice himself. Fowler, a Bible school teacher who earns $3,000 per execution and has overseen seven in total, told New York Magazine that Pike deserves to die to give "a sense of justice" to Colleen Slemmer's mother, who watched the failed procedure.

Pike, 50, said in her first statement that she had accepted death before stepping into the chamber, only to wake days later alone in hospital, telling her legal team: 'My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt.'

Her lawyers have filed an emergency federal court motion accusing Tennessee officials of keeping her in indefinite isolation at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in breach of a 2024 agreement that ended 30 years of solitary confinement.

Investigators found Pike's IV lines had been misinserted; no one else is known to have walked away from a lethal injection, a distinction that places her situation on entirely new legal ground.