Last week, I was one of the seven media witnesses who observed Tennessee fail to execute convicted murderer Christa Pike, the first woman to face the death penalty in the state in almost 200 years. This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News. From our previous reporting, each of us had an inkling that the lethal injection process might not go according to plan.
Pike's attorneys had asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to allow her to be hanged instead, citing concerns that a platelet disorder and small veins would make the actual injection not only painful but ineffective. And Tennessee had already botched an execution attempt in May, when healthcare workers failed to establish complete IV access into Tony Carruthers, who was sentenced to death after being convicted for his involvement in the kidnapping and murders of three people in 1994. Bill Lee said after the failed execution of Carruthers, who has maintained he is innocent, the state wouldn't try again to kill him for at least a year.
After Pike left the execution chamber in an ambulance on Sept. 30, Lee announced he would suspend lethal injections for the rest of the year. The morning of Pike's scheduled execution, I and the other media witnesses arrived at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville by 8:30 a.m. and waited to be ushered into the prison with nothing but our driver's licenses in hand. The plan was to wait inside until Pike began her journey to the death chamber at 10 a.m.
Before the Department of Correction's staffers began moving us away from the outdoor media tent and our belongings, the reporters' phones all went off. A federal circuit court had stayed the execution. This was my fifth stint as a media witness to an execution, and I'd never seen a stay issued.
We didn't know what that would mean. It turned out to mean waiting for nine hours at the prison, barred from leaving the grounds. We spent most of it in the boardroom where parole hearings take place.
Throughout the wait, the victim's family often came up in conversation. In 1995, Pike, then 18 years old, killed Colleen Slemmer, who was 19. Slemmer's family lives in Florida and traveled to Tennessee for the execution with money raised through crowdfunding.
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