Christa Pike's final words before hospitalization following two failed lethal injection attempts
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all remaining scheduled executions this year and ordered a ‘comprehensive, third party review to determine exactly what occurred’ after death row inmate Christa Pike's lawyers said she was still alive following two lethal injections.
Per Sky News, Pike, 50, was due to become the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years. Her lawyers filed an emergency motion to halt the execution, claiming she was still alive after both syringes had been administered. They said she had 'not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat,' and was 'audibly snoring'.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said Pike was taken from the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to an off-site medical facility.
It insisted ‘every step of the state's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney general's office’ had been followed. Her lawyers said they had ‘not been informed as to her condition’.
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What Happened during Christa Pike's execution?
The execution in Nashville on Wednesday (September 30th) went ahead after the US Supreme Court overturned a reprieve ordered an hour before it was due.
At 7.27pm local time, moments before the first injection, Pike said: "I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love."
But she remained awake, and the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered by 8:26pm.
Reporters who witnessed the attempt described gasps and complaints of pain from Pike, according to NBC News. They said she kicked her feet so much that she knocked her sheets off.
Her lawyers said the curtains had ‘gone down twice’, and witnesses heard snoring until the microphone was turned off at 8:53pm.
The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit critical of problems in how the death penalty is applied, called it 'one of the worst botched executions in the modern death penalty era'.
They added 'This debacle was entirely preventable.'
Executive director Robin Maher said seven other people have survived medical problems after execution teams failed to access a vein, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions.
She described Pike's case as ‘singular and unparalleled’. In May, Tony Carruthers' execution was called off after officials couldn't find a suitable vein.
He was convicted of killing three people in 1994.
Pike is the only woman on death row in Tennessee, and the last woman executed in the state was in 1820, historical records show. She and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of torturing and killing Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville, in 1995. Prosecutors said Pike feared Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend and lured her to a wooded area.
A pentagram was carved on the victim's body, which stoked fears of Satan worship during the so-called ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s and 1990s.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A judge sentenced Pike to death in 1996. She doesn't deny the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider her age at the time, mental illness and a history of severe sexual abuse.
Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, traveled to Nashville hoping to witness the execution.
She described the attempt as ‘a mess’ in a phone interview with NBC News. “They went to try to execute her, and she didn't die,” she said. Martinez said Pike never expressed remorse, and that when asked what her message to the governor and attorney general was, she replied: “They f***** up.”
UNILAD has contacted the Tennessee Department of Correction for comment.
Thomas Bamford