Tennessee's second botched execution this year unfolded Wednesday night when convicted murderer Christa Pike survived two lethal-injection doses, forcing officials to halt the process and hospitalize her, lawyers said, according to The New York Times. Her execution had already been pushed back nine hours amid conflicting court orders before the state pushed ahead.
Despite two pentobarbital syringes, Pike never lost consciousness, breathing audibly with a steady heartbeat, attorneys said. The cause was unclear; lawyers later confirmed to a judge that she was hospitalized though they had no further details, while state officials told a federal judge she was receiving medical attention.
"This event is the worst we've seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era," said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "There is no precedent." Witnesses described Pike as alert, even singing briefly with her spiritual adviser before curtains opened near 6:30 p.m. showing her strapped to a gurney.
"I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life," she said. "And that is with love." She described a burning sensation in her arm, witnesses said, prompting the curtains to close briefly before reopening. Roughly an hour later, with the curtain shut again, reporters said they heard breathing and snoring.
The New York Times reported that Riverbend Maximum Security Institution officials declined comment, though the Tennessee Department of Correction said it "had followed every step of the state's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney general's office." The department added, "The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective."
It was Tennessee's second drug-administration failure this year, after medics in May could not find a usable vein during one of four scheduled executions. Pike's lawyers had warned beforehand that her small veins, sexual-trauma history and other conditions could make the process torturous.
"We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy," they said in a joint statement after the execution attempt.
Pike, 50 and convicted in a 1995 killing, would have been the state's first woman executed in over 200 years had it succeeded. The US Supreme Court had cleared the attempt hours earlier, reversing a lower-court pause over her defense's claim that her original trial failed to properly address her childhood abuse history, with three liberal justices dissenting.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority "unnecessarily prevents" the appeals court from fully considering Pike's argument, adding, "I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision." Justices Kagan and Jackson joined her dissent, which also argued "Tennessee's desire to expedite Pike's execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh" her interest in staying alive.
In 1995, Pike, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend, lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, into University of Tennessee woods and killed her brutally, later showing off a piece of her skull. Shipp, aged 17 at the time, was too young for the death penalty and got life in prison instead; parole was denied last year.
Slemmer's family backed the execution, traveling from Florida to witness it, with her mother May Martinez saying that Pike could never atone for her daughter's death. Tennessee's only woman on death row, Pike has expressed remorse. Lawyers pointed to bipolar disorder and PTSD, diagnosed in prison, as contributing to her violence, while fellow inmates called her supportive and kind.
Outside, demonstrators on both sides of the debate reacted with confusion, some leaving in frustration. Tennessee remains among few US states still pursuing executions; Alabama executed a man by lethal injection this month the Supreme Court had rejected the planned nitrogen-gas method, and August saw three states execute people on one day for the first time in over a decade.
