The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee has been “the talk of the town” among prisoners on Nevada’s death row at High Desert State Prison, one of them said this week.

“It scares me to death, because then I’m going to end up in a situation like this young lady,” said Pedro Rodriguez, 47, who was sentenced to die in 1999 for his role in the robbery and fatal shooting of Kimberly Fondy, a paraplegic woman in Sparks.

On Sept. 30, Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital that were intended to be fatal and was reportedly left unconscious and on a ventilator. She has since regained consciousness, according to her attorneys. Experts have suggested that a faulty IV line could have led the drug to concentrate in her tissue instead of going into her bloodstream.

Rodriguez described what happened to Pike as “gruesome.”

“Everybody’s nervous about it,” he said in a phone interview.

Pedro Rodriguez

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson in April announced plans to seek execution warrants for three convicted killers. Two of those requests are on hold pending rulings from the Nevada Supreme Court; one has not been filed.

Some legal experts and death row inmates told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that they have concerns that if Nevada conducts an execution — which the state has not done in over 20 years — it would be botched.

Nevada authorities have said they plan to use a lethal injection cocktail that attorneys for the state prison system acknowledged has never been tried before. Experts say that increases the potential for error.

“It’s human experimentation,” said Scott Coffee, a former public defender with extensive experience litigating capital cases in Nevada.

Decision-makers aren’t talking.

The district attorney’s office declined to comment for this story. The Nevada attorney general’s office, which represents the Nevada Department of Corrections, deferred to prison officials, who did not provide any comment about botched executions.

“The NDOC does not have any executions scheduled at this time,” prisons spokesperson Teri Vance said. “Drug protocols are determined once the executions are scheduled.”

Getting creative

Over the past 160 years, Nevada has hanged, shot, gassed and poisoned its condemned prisoners.

Beginning with the execution of serial killer Carroll Edward Cole in 1985, the state has relied on lethal injection. Eleven of the 12 inmates executed since Nevada reinstated capital punishment in 1977 have been so-called “volunteers,” or prisoners who gave up appeals and agreed to be put to death.

The last Nevada execution, of double murderer Daryl Mack in April 2006, used a mixture of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

In recent years, as the death penalty has dipped in popularity and obtaining the requisite drugs has become harder and harder, states have had to get creative.

Alabama executed a man with a face mask containing nitrogen in 2024, a novel execution method. Kenneth Eugene Smith “shook and convulsed for minutes,” The Associated Press reported.

Idaho decided to authorize firing squads.

Tennessee switched from a three-drug mixture to use of only pentobarbital.

Under a 2021 execution protocol filed in ongoing litigation, Nevada would use one of two possible drug cocktails.

One would use fentanyl or alfentanil, ketamine, cisatracurium and potassium chloride or potassium acetate. The other would use fentanyl or alfentanil, ketamine and potassium chloride or potassium acetate.

Attorneys for the state and for inmates facing execution acknowledged in a joint status report this May that as far as they knew, fentanyl had only been used once in an execution, which occurred in Nebraska in 2018.

“Ketamine has not been used in an execution,” they wrote.

Retired Nevada Supreme Court Justice Michael Cherry, who opposes the death penalty, said a novel drug mixture means that something like what happened to Pike could be repeated in Nevada.

“I hate to be the state that makes the precedent to see if it works or not,” he said.

Potential for complications

Coffee notes that those with good medical training often don’t want to play a role in an execution.

“We try to come up with better ways to do it,” he said. “The problem is, there’s no kinder, gentler, easy way to kill somebody.”

Rodriguez, the death row inmate, agreed.

“They’re trying to say that they’re trying to make it more humane for us, but murder is murder, death is death, there’s nothing humane about it,” he said.

James Biela, 45, was sentenced to death in 2010 for the rape and murder of 19-year-old Brianna Denison, who was abducted in Reno in 2008.

“I think it’s disturbing,” he said of Pike’s botched execution.

But he said in a phone interview that he’s not worried about something similar happening to him because capital cases move slowly and he believes he’s far away from an execution date.

“They just spend so much money on this … and the whole thing’s just pretty much a joke and they never use it,” he said.

Some Nevada executions have entailed complications.

Before the 1998 execution of Roderick Abeyta, it took staff 25 minutes to find a vein for an IV, Assistant Federal Public Defender Michael Pescetta said in 2006, according to Review-Journal archives.

Pescetta also said that during the execution of Sebastian Bridges in 2001, the condemned man was apparently conscious when he died and was still “shouting about the injustice of his execution.”

The Death Penalty Information Center includes Abeyta on a long list of botched executions.

Former Clark County District Attorney David Roger said the attempted execution of Pike should not give Nevada pause in carrying out an execution.

If reports of an administration issue are accurate, he said, “we shouldn’t have a concern about the cocktail, we should just make sure that we have good phlebotomists or whoever is going to insert the IVs.”

Disputes about drugs

Wolfson, the Clark County district attorney, said in an April interview with the Review-Journal that his office would pursue execution warrants for Donald Sherman, Zane Floyd and Sterling Atkins.

Prosecutors have not requested a warrant for Atkins. The warrant requests for Sherman and Floyd are now on pause.

Sherman bludgeoned a retired doctor to death with a hammer in 1994 while on parole for another killing.

Donald Sherman (Las Vegas Review-Journal File)

Floyd killed four people at an Albertsons supermarket in 1999.

Atkins was sentenced to death for his role, with two other men, in the 1994 beating, sexual assault, and strangulation of a young mother in North Las Vegas.

Floyd’s attorneys have raised the alarm about the danger of a flawed or painful execution.

Zane Floyd (Nevada Department of Corrections)

Assistant Federal Public Defenders David Anthony and Brad Levenson wrote in a 2022 brief that Nevada’s protocol risked “unconstitutional harm.”

They argued that fentanyl and alfentanil could not reliably block awareness and could cause “conscious suffocation.”

Cisatracurium also could cause conscious paralysis and suffocation, while masking complications, they said.

They said the state proposed a dose of ketamine much larger than what an anesthesiologist would normally use.

And they asserted that potassium chloride or potassium acetate, the “killing agent,” would cause excruciating pain without proper anesthesia.

Sterling Atkins (Nevada Department of Corrections)

Attorneys for the state have argued that speculation about the possibility of error in a “properly designed protocol” is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

“The Protocol does not add pain to intensify Plaintiff’s death sentence,” Chief Deputy Attorney General D. Randall Gilmer wrote in one filing. “Rather, the Protocol was specifically designed to limit pain and suffering.”

Alfentanil and ketamine would block pain and make Floyd lose consciousness, he said.

Dueling experts have testified in federal litigation over the execution procedure.

Dr. Steve Yun, an expert who testified for the state, said, “(I)n general, my opinion is that these drugs at the very large doses being proposed would be effectively fatal in producing death in a given person.”

Gilmer said Yun is personally opposed to the death penalty.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a witness called by Floyd’s attorneys, said at one hearing that it would be unsound scientifically to hypothesize that a higher than clinical dose of a drug would have a particular effect in an execution.

“I think there’s no connection whatsoever there, that execution is not in any way a medical act, and I don’t think anything can be lifted from a clinic scenario and placed in an execution in any meaningful way,” he said.

Zivot has worked as an expert for Pike’s defense team, as well.

Some politicians have raised alarms, too.

A group of Democratic U.S. senators wrote to the Food and Drug Administration and Drug Enforcement Administration in 2024 to register their concerns about prisons obtaining unsafe drugs to carry out lethal injections, contributing to botched executions.

Nevada called off the execution of Scott Dozier in 2018 after drug companies objected to the use of their products.

Nevada called off the execution of Scott Dozier in 2018 after drug companies objected to the use of their products. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

In the May status report, attorneys for the prison system acknowledged that the state did not have any of the drugs prescribed by the current protocol in unexpired form. They said that previously obtained drugs had expired.

Just 52 percent of Americans supported capital punishment for someone convicted of murder in 2025, down from a high of 80 percent in 1994, according to Gallup polling.

Clark County Chief Deputy Public Defender Ryan Bashor said he thinks what happened to Pike has captured the public’s attention because it highlights the problems inherent in executing people.

“While it may not immediately cause change, I really do think that the Pike situation is going to reinvigorate the debate about the appropriateness of the death penalty and its effectiveness, its utility,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Contact Casey Harrison at charrison@reviewjournal.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report.