Christa Pike is in the hospital this morning after surviving the State of Tennessee’s botched attempt to execute her by lethal injection last night.
Her attorneys, who have not been informed about her condition, said in a statement early this morning that “the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
Ms. Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed at 10 am yesterday for a murder in 1995, when she was 18 years old.
That morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered the execution stayed until further order of the court. The State appealed directly to the Supreme Court, which vacated the stay shortly before 6 pm local time.
Three hours later, a lawyer for Ms. Pike reported that she was still alive and breathing after members of the execution team administered two syringes of pentobarbital. Shortly after 9 pm, media witnesses were required to leave the prison and saw an ambulance and other first responders pull up outside.
At a news conference, media witnesses described hearing Ms. Pike complaining about pain and snoring, and saw her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets that covered her, according to NBC News.
Journalists said that they entered the witness room at 6:41 pm and the blinds opened at 7:26 pm. They reported hearing Ms. Pike speak multiple full sentences throughout the process.
“My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” WKRN reporter Tori Gessner heard Ms. Pike say. Ms. Gessner, who has witnessed several executions, said, “Nothing about today was normal, typical, at all.”
The blinds closed at 7:46 pm, but witnesses could still hear Ms. Pike breathing. When the blinds reopened three minutes later, she was still breathing and began snoring, according to witnesses.
The blinds closed again at 8:05 pm and prison officials removed witnesses from the room at 8:53 pm. Even after the microphone was cut off, they could still hear Ms. Pike breathing.
No officials with the Tennessee Department of Correction appeared at the press conference or spoke to the media. The department did not provide a statement for more than two hours, saying in an email that it stood by its protocol and that Ms. Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility.
Ms. Pike’s attorneys filed an emergency motion to stay the execution and provide medical care to Ms. Pike, writing that even after executioners injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals, she “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat.”
At 10:05 pm, the Tennessean reported that a federal judge ruled the request was moot because the State said that medical care was already being administered.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced shortly before midnight that the state is pausing all executions for the rest of the year. He called for a “comprehensive, third-party review” of what happened to Christa Pike.
A History of Botched Executions
This is the second botched execution attempt in Tennessee in fewer than five months.
On May 21, prison officials strapped Tony Carruthers to a gurney and subjected him to multiple painful and bloody punctures to access his veins while he writhed in agony for an extended period of time before Tennessee’s executioners declared they could not execute him.
This is also the second time that Gov. Lee has paused executions in the wake of a botched execution.
In 2022, a moratorium was declared to allow for a third-party investigation into “operational failures” in Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol after an undisclosed “technical oversight” led the governor to call off the execution of Oscar Smith on April 21, 2022.
Two top corrections officials were fired after that review found that lethal injection drugs were not tested as required by Tennessee’s protocol.
Indeed, the review found that corrections officials failed to tell the pharmacy that made and tested lethal injection drugs that it was required to test all injection chemicals for endotoxins. The State never even gave the pharmacy a copy of the lethal injection protocol, the report revealed.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in 2018 that Tennessee was likely to inflict “several minutes of torturous pain” on Billy Irick, who presented undisputed evidence that the three-drug protocol “will cause him to experience sensations of drowning, suffocating, and being burned alive from the inside out.”
Autopsy reports have revealed that lethal injection causes severe pain and severe respiratory distress with associated sensations of drowning, asphyxiation, panic, and terror in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Short-Circuiting Review of an Unreliable Death Sentence
Christa Pike was convicted in the murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, along with her boyfriend and another friend. Because he was 17 at the time, her boyfriend was sentenced to life imprisonment and is eligible for parole, according to NBC News. The other accomplice served as a lookout and received probation in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution.
At 18, Christa was not protected from execution. Since the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional for people under 17, death sentences for teens have become increasingly rare, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
According to court records and psychological assessments reported by The New York Times, Ms. Pike suffered physical, sexual, and mental abuse at the hands of her family. As early as kindergarten, she endured repeated rape and assault.
A psychological evaluation found that Christa’s mother’s boyfriends and other men molested her from a young age. And when she was 17, the year before the crime, police reports show she was walking to the store when a man threw her to the ground and raped her. No one was ever arrested, NBC reported.
The level of trauma Christa Pike experienced “is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” the psychologist who evaluated her wrote.
Doctors have since diagnosed Ms. Pike with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers argue contributed to her mental state at the time of the crime, The New York Times reported.
The jury never learned about Ms. Pike’s history of trauma and abuse and her attorneys have argued that her trial counsel’s failure to present that evidence violated her right to effective assistance of counsel.
“If Christa Pike was tried today, I do not believe a jury that knew about the documented sexual abuse and neglect she experienced as a child would sentence her to death,” Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said.
The courts denied relief after the State argued that Ms. Pike “is a liar who fabricated sexual abuse,” the Sixth Circuit wrote.
But prosecutors now concede that Ms. Pike’s history of child sexual abuse and rape is true—a concession that Ms. Pike’s counsel argue “erodes the foundation” of her state court proceedings and the federal proceedings that followed.
In court filings, Ms. Pike argued that (as the Sixth Circuit put it) “the State’s representations about her history of sexual abuse tainted the state court proceedings and the subsequent federal ones by introducing damaging stereotypes of survivors of sexual assault.”
The federal appeals court ordered the stay of execution to adequately address these issues.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments,” Judge Jane B. Stranch wrote, joined by Judge Karen Moore.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the stay because it “clears the way for the State to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered.”
“I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, adding that “Tennessee’s desire to expedite Pike’s execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her ‘fundamental interest in [her] own life.’”