Tennessee governor Bill Lee on Thursday announced a pause on the remaining executions in the state after Christa Pike, who was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for her role in a 1995 murder, had survived the two doses of lethal injections.
After being administered two dosages of pentobarbital, a drug used in single-drug executions where a massive overdose is given to slow down vital bodily functions before leading to death, Pike had lost consciousness but still had a steady heartbeat. Her attorneys later confirmed that she was quickly taken to the hospital to receive emergency medical treatment, stating that she was in “unnecessary agony,” before filing an emergency motion to stay the execution.
Her attempted execution was preceded by a last-minute series of legal developments over her claims of childhood abuse, execution methods, and her present medical condition. Rights organizations such as the UN Human Rights Office have campaigned extensively to halt her execution due to her adverse childhood experiences. Her attorneys argued that the failure to present her history of suffering from sexual violence and mental health issues to the jury would be “a form of gender-based violence prohibited under international law.”
The Cornell Center for the Death Penalty pointed out that in light of the fact that Pike had committed the crime as a teenager and that she was subjected to parental abandonment, neglect and rape throughout various periods of her life leading up to the murder, her sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment. Her co-conspirators, Tadaryl Shipp, her boyfriend at the time, and Shadolla Peterson did not receive the death penalty for their involvement in the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
In the moments leading up to her attempted execution, her attorneys filed challenges with the Supreme Court of Tennessee, stating that she had “small compromised veins,” which could lead to extravasation, an accidental leakage of intravenous (IV) fluid into the surrounding tissue resulting in extreme pain. They asked for hanging to be an alternative execution method, which was rejected by Senior Judge Mark Ward as he found that her diagnosis failed to create a “substantial risk” that IV access would cause “an objectively intolerable risk of harm.”
Roughly an hour before her scheduled lethal injection, a divided US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit panel granted a last-minute stay of the execution for Christa Pike in order to properly analyze how the state’s reversal on her childhood abuse history impacted her prior appeals and to determine the accurate classification of her motion. However, the US Supreme Court later vacated the Sixth Circuit’s stay and cleared the way for the execution to move forward as planned.
Tennessee’s execution protocol provides for a scenario where an inmate still remains alive after the first set of drug syringes (Set A) is administered, but it is silent on further procedures if an inmate remains alive after the second set (Set B) is given.
Christa Pike’s botched execution comes after an earlier execution attempt of Tony Carruthers in May of this year failed after an intravenous line could not be established despite multiple tries.