Tennessee death row prisoner Christa Pike was rushed to hospital still alive after being administered two lethal injections, her legal team has confirmed. Pike's lawyers filed an emergency motion to halt the execution as it was under way, stating: "Ms Pike has lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring."
Execution halted amid medical emergency
One of Pike's attorneys told the BBC that she was "being provided life-saving measures" following the two injections, while a death penalty expert described the situation as an unprecedented failure. "We have not been informed as to her condition," Pike's lawyers said in a statement.
Pike had been set to become the first woman executed in over 200 years on Wednesday, though the execution had already faced delays while the court considered whether Pike's allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully taken into account during her sentencing.
Supreme Court ruling and legal challenges
The Supreme Court's three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the ruling, with Ms Sotomayor writing that it clears the way for the execution to happen "before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered". Despite an appeals court stepping in to halt the lethal injection just an hour before it was due to commence, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the execution should proceed.
Officials administered two doses of pentobarbital to Pike, according to court filings submitted by her legal team late on Wednesday. Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, described what Pike endured as "singular and unparalleled". While seven other individuals have survived medical complications stemming from the execution team's inability to establish venous access for administering lethal injection drugs, nobody has previously remained alive after receiving the substances used in such executions, she stated.
Witness accounts and background
Media observers watching from a separate chamber reported that officials drew back the curtains to the execution room at 7.27pm, revealing Pike secured to a gurney. Pike stayed conscious and at one moment lifted her head and questioned prison staff whether her arm was meant to feel that way. What she was referring to remained unclear.
By 8.26pm, execution observers noted that the second dose of pentobarbital had been given. Pike could still be heard snoring behind the drawn curtain until the microphone was switched off at 8.53pm. At that moment an announcement was made to escort media observers from the vicinity.
Pike was found guilty at 18 years old, along with her boyfriend, of stabbing and beating 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case attracted widespread media attention after Colleen was discovered with an inverted pentagram - a symbol linked to satanic groups - carved into her chest. Pike has maintained she did not carve the symbol herself.
Despite Pike's assertions that she did not 'even realise the gravity of what I'd done', two fellow inmates at the facility subsequently testified that she had boasted about the killing both before and afterwards, even displaying a fragment of Colleen's skull. Colleen Slemmer's mother made the journey from Florida to Tennessee for the execution, stating she has spent decades awaiting the fulfilment of Pike's sentence. She said: "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run. Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst."
Following the murder, Pike received diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency appeal, she claimed she had only intended to fight Ms Slemmer but killed her during a frenzied assault when she could not "put the brakes on". "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime," Pike said in a statement.
