'Angry and confused': ITV News follows Christa Pike's lawyers into a Tennessee court
The British broadcaster's report on the death row inmate who woke six days after a failed lethal injection drew a comment section ten times busier than its usual first day.
ITV News
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 401,701 views a day, 12 times a normal first day on this channel (32,645).
Lawyer reveals Christa Pike's first words after waking up from failed execution
Most of the news broadcasters close to ITV News in size are running well below their usual daily pace, and ITV News is among them. Its American story is the exception.
"Lawyer reveals Christa Pike's first words after waking up from failed execution" passed about 160,000 views in its first six hours. It reports from a court hearing on Wednesday, where one of Pike's attorneys said she had regained consciousness roughly six days after Tennessee tried to execute her on September 30 and was "speaking limitedly." Executioners had given her two lethal doses of pentobarbital. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. She is the only person known to have survived a lethal injection in the United States.
A shorter clip from the same hearing ran well ahead of the channel's other Shorts. In it, her lawyers describe her as "angry and confused" and call her "the ultimate survivor." They are asking the court to preserve all the evidence from the failed execution for any future legal challenge.
The comments under the longer report arrived far faster than this channel normally sees. Many remember Colleen Slemmer by name. Others focus on how the drugs were administered, and a long thread debates the death penalty itself.
On the same day, a report that Donald Trump will speak to Vladimir Putin about the death of a Russian plague lab worker pulled in a similar crowd. It adds a new angle to a story the channel's science coverage had already followed.
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- Channel
- ITV News
- Subscribers
- 2,250,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 7,442,616
- Channel views, pace per day
- 513,710 (on a normal day: 1,256,532)
- Video published
- October 7, 2026
- Video views so far
- 159,405 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 401,701
The numbers
Two Christa Pike reports and a plague story carried the channel on a day when its overall pace sat well below usual.
