Tennessee death-row prisoner Christa Pike survives lethal injections

Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate three decades ago, has survived Tennessee’s effort to execute her ⁠by means of lethal injection, prison officials said.

Her lawyers said that she had left the prison in an ambulance on Wednesday night and was being treated at a hospital.

“Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” lawyer Randy Spivey said during a Thursday news conference. “But we know she is alive right now and receiving live-saving medical care.”

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her lawyers said in court filings.

Journalists who witnessed Wednesday’s attempted execution described snoring, ⁠loud exhales, gasps and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid over her, according to NBC News.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said in a statement that he has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that the remaining scheduled execution will not take place this year.

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”.

The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Supreme Court ruling

Pike, 50, had been scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for a murder she committed at age 18. Her killing would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.

An appeals court ruling stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start, but a Supreme Court ruling later overturned the stay.

Following the top court’s ruling, officials attempted to go ahead with the execution as planned.

At 7:46pm local time (23:46 GMT), prison officials closed the curtain separating Pike from the media viewing room. It was raised three minutes later, when witnesses said Pike could be heard snoring loudly.

The curtain was closed again at 8:06pm. Witnesses continued to hear Pike snoring until the microphone was switched off at about 8:53pm (00:53 GMT), when they were told to leave the area. Emergency vehicles were seen coming and going from the prison.

Earlier, the execution had been halted when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay.

The appeals court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered during her sentencing.

Later on Wednesday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution. Its conservative majority did not explain the decision, while the three liberal justices dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that vacating the stay “unnecessarily prevents” the appeals court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.

Tennessee’s attorney general had argued that delaying the execution traumatised the family of Pike’s victim, Colleen Slemmer, and rewarded what it called “abusive delay tactics”.

The killing in 1995

Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville.

Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.

Pike does not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argue the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse, including that she was raped from early childhood.

“It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her lawyers wrote in a filing.

After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder.

In her clemency petition, she said she had initially intended to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack 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.

Slemmer’s mother has said she wants Pike’s death sentence carried out after waiting decades for the execution.

Tennessee has not executed a woman for at least 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed in the US, representing about 1 percent of all executions, according to the centre.