Reporter Michael Graczyk has covered nearly 500 executions carried out in Texas, continuing even after his 2018 retirement from The . He remembers two instances where needles popped out before reinsertion for successful execution - but never one in which an inmate survived. That's what happened this week in Tennessee, when 50-year-old inmate Christa Pike remained breathing and audibly snoring after two separate doses of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used in the state's lethal injection protocol.
Graczyk, 76, says he wasn't entirely surprised to hear of the anomaly - and had actually thought about the possibility during his decades-long career as a Texas journalist. "It seems to me it was just a matter of time," he told BBC News. Tennessee's execution protocol calls for a secondary set of pentobarbital-filled syringes in case the person being put to death does not die after the first set, according to AP, but does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
Governor Bill Lee halted executions in the state after Wednesday night's failure, ordering an independent review into procedures. Botched executions have come under scrutiny over the past decade, since a shortage of the drugs used led some states to change the formula, or procure drugs from more questionable sources. Some states even brought back death by firing squad as an alternative.
The secret hunt for lethal drugs used in US executions Pike is now in hospital where she is receiving "life-saving care", according to her lawyer. It's not uncommon for lethal injections - the most frequently used form of capital punishment in the 27 US states where the penalty is legal - to be "botched". The Death Penalty Information Center, a think-tank that does not take a stance on the death penalty, lists 64 botched executions since 1982, 51 of them lethal injections.
In at least seven of those cases, the executions were halted because the IV line could not be set. But Graczyk has never seen an execution fail after the injection was delivered. "That has never happened here," Graczyk said of the Lone Star State.
Graczyk, who covered a wide range of topics for the AP during his 46 years with the news service, considers his prolific attendance at executions to be an important part of the job. "There is no [greater] authority, power, or whatever you want to call it, that state or federal government has over us than the power to take our life," he said. There have been 1,683 executions in the US since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre. which is when the US Supreme Court re-instated the death penalty.
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