Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure. Pike was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said.
She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition. Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10am Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the US Supreme Court overturned that stay.
Read moreUS Supreme Court clears way for Tennessee execution of woman for murder Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”. The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set.
It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled”. Seven other people have survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.
Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27pm, showing Pike strapped to a gurney. She described herself as at peace. But Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way.
It was not clear what she was referencing. By 8:26pm, execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered. Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53pm.
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