Doctor claims Christa Pike’s blood condition may have ‘saved her life’ after failed execution
Christa Pike's blood condition may have been the reason her life was spared after two failed attempts at giving her the lethal injection on September 30.
Dr Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who had allegedly previously examined Pike, recently opened up on his thoughts regarding her health, and why could have caused her execution to go wrong.
The 50-year-old remains in a ‘critically ill' state, according to her lawyers, who issued an update on her health just yesterday (October 2) and is being treated at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.
It comes as Pike had been given life saving measures after being injected with two doses of pentobarbital during her scheduled execution. However, witnesses say she remained alive and even began to ‘snore’.
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Court documents filed by her attorneys confirmed she is currently on a ventilator, as they petition to investigate her execution.
The lawyers claim the filing ‘details the serious complications that occurred during the execution attempt, many of which Christa and her attorneys had warned the State and the courts about months earlier.’
The warnings include Pike’s thrombocytosis, which is a condition the Cleveland Clinic explains is a blood clotting disorder.
The lawyers spent months attempting to stay the execution or to change the method of death so that Pike would not undergo a painful process, because she also allegedly has tricky veins.
During TMZ's YouTube series, In The Know, Dr Zivot claimed that this could have been the reason the execution failed.
He explained that the clotting may have occurred shortly after the needles were inserted, blocking any vein from receiving the deadly drug.
He went on to say that the clotting could have led to the veins targeted by the execution team, to explode due to this process.
From that point on, the pentobarbital would have leaked into the tissue in her arm and not in her bloodstream.
Pentobarbital, per the Clinic, is a sedative drug that is used to calm overactive nerves, but also kills a person if there's enough of it at one time in the bloodstream.
Dr Zivot explained that it is likely that the ‘pentobarbital never made it into her bloodstream in a sufficient quantity that led to her death.’
He also said it could be due to the drug itself having ‘degraded’ and lost its potency.
However, he was quick to clear up any rumor that Pike is immune to the lethal injection.
"Christa Pike does not possess some kind of magical pentobarbital resistance. It's not because she has some unique physiology that resists the effect of pentobarbital,” he said on the show.
Pike would have been the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years and has been on death row for three decades after being convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
The 18-year-old and her then-17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp tortured Slemmer for 30 minutes, carved a pentagram into her chest before ending her life by hitting her head with asphalt in January 1995.
Britt Jones