Christa Pike was in critical condition on Thursday and receiving “lifesaving care” at a hospital, her lawyers said, a day after a failed attempt to execute her pushed Tennessee’s governor to halt further executions this year and order an independent review.
Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, was taken to a hospital on Wednesday night after surviving a double dose of the drug Tennessee uses to execute prisoners.
“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” lawyer Randy Spivey said during a news conference.
“But we know she is alive right now.”
The failed execution, which one death penalty expert described as unprecedented, led Republican governor Bill Lee to order a review, calling what happened “deeply disturbing” and indefinitely postponing Pike’s execution and another one that had been scheduled for this year.
It also reignited the debate over the state’s execution procedures, including its single-drug lethal injections.
Mr Spivey called the process cruel and torturous, saying he was “haunted” by watching and hearing Pike talking, singing and then snoring loudly during her more than 90 minutes in the death chamber.
Her lawyers also said it was unclear if she might have suffered brain damage from being deprived of oxygen.
May Martinez, whose daughter was murdered by Pike and her boyfriend and who travelled to Nashville to watch the execution, was also upset.
“I didn’t get justice for my daughter,” Ms Martinez told The Associated Press on Thursday.
“I watched the whole thing. She was awake. She was laughing. She was moving her head, moving her feet. She was trying to sit up.
“Didn’t work the first time they gave her a shot. It didn’t work the second time.”
The execution team worked for an hour to administer the lethal drugs, said Pike’s lawyer, who counted at least seven needles in her left arm.
During the struggle to locate a vein, Pike even suggested where they might find one, he said.
“Please try here, please try here,” Mr Spivey recalled her saying.
“She told them over and over, please try higher on my shoulder.”
At one point, Pike asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way, though it is unclear if it was after the first dose entered her body because officials do not share that information.
Neither the initial nor backup dose of pentobarbital worked.
Pike was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the attempt.
Another of Pike’s lawyers, Steve Ferrell, said she feared there would be complications because of a lifelong blood disorder that made it tough to get needles into her veins.
“Throughout her life, she’s explained to us that she had trouble having blood drawn,” he said.
It was quite possible, Mr Ferrell said, that the IV line did not enter her vein properly and that the drug was filling her arm instead of entering her bloodstream.
Pike’s lawyers now want her death sentence to be commuted.
Now age 50, she was sentenced to death for a murder she committed at 18.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
An appeals court had stopped her execution an hour before it was scheduled to begin on Wednesday morning, but the US Supreme Court overturned that stay hours later.
It was the second time this year that Tennessee was unable to complete an execution.
In the other case, officials could not find a suitable vein for an IV line so the drugs were not administered.
Mr Lee said it appeared prison staff followed procedure, and there was no clear sense on Thursday about what went wrong.
Pentobarbital, the barbiturate Tennessee uses for executions, has been used to carry out death sentences in multiple states and by the federal government.
But there have been concerns raised about the potential for “unnecessary pain and suffering”.
Dr Ervin Yen, an Oklahoma City anesthesiologist who has no link to Pike’s execution but who has witnessed others, said it’s possible that if the prison staff was using a small vein, there could have been some burning, as mentioned by Pike’s lawyers.
“It just depends on the vein that you’re injecting it in and how fast you are injecting,” Dr Yen said.
Tennessee in 2024 switched from a three-drug series for lethal injections to a single drug, pentobarbital.
That came about two years after the state abruptly halted the execution of Oscar Smith and acknowledged it had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs had been tested properly.
Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled” in that she survived long enough to be moved to a hospital.
Seven others have survived medical problems because of 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 executions, she said.
Executions in the US have fallen sharply since the beginning of this century, but the number nearly doubled last year behind a record increase in Florida.
Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the US this year.
Strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber, Pike described herself as at peace.
When asked if she had any last words, Pike said several things, including: “I’m at peace. I’m ready to be free… This is a happy day.”
But she remained awake, and at one point complained about the feeling in her arm.
The chamber’s curtains were closed, suggesting it had been five minutes since the first dose was administered.
But they were reopened three minutes later.
Her lawyers filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and the procedure violated her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.
Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate.
The killing stoked fears of Satan worship because of a pentagram carved on Ms Slemmer’s body.
Pike’s boyfriend was not eligible for the death penalty because he was 17 at the time of the killing and received a sentence of life in prison.
He was denied parole last year.
Pike did not dispute that she helped kill Ms Slemmer, but supporters argued that Pike’s age at the time of the murder, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse should be considered.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after the killing.
“It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done,” she once said.
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