A woman sentenced to death survived two lethal injection attempts

Oct 01 (Jowhar)- Tennessee officials were unable to execute Christa Pike yesterday for a 1995 murder despite administering two doses of lethal injection drugs.

A capital punishment expert stated it was an unprecedented failure.

Pike was alive and screaming after the botched execution attempt and was taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said.

“Her condition was not communicated,” Pike's attorneys said in a statement.

Pike, who is 50 years old, was scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. local time yesterday for a murder she committed at 18, and she would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.

An appeals court halted the execution an hour before it was set to begin, and hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted that stay.

Officials administered Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late yesterday.

Robin M Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, stated that what Pike experienced was “unique and unprecedented.”

Seven other individuals have survived medical complications due to the execution team’s failure to establish an IV to administer the lethal drugs, but no one has survived after receiving the drugs used for such executions, she said.

The attorneys for Pike said: “We are not happy to correct, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike have become real: Accessing the vein is difficult, the veins are collapsing, pentobarbital is degrading, emergency medical care is unavailable when everything goes wrong, and all of this is under a secret protocol.”

Media witnesses watching from a special room reported that officials raised the curtains in the execution chamber at 7:27pm, revealing Pike strapped to a gurney.

Pike appeared to be conscious and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her hand was supposed to feel that way. It was unclear what she was referring to.

By 8:26pm, witnesses to the execution reported that a second dose of pentobarbital was administered.

Pike could be heard gasping behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53pm.

At that time, there was an announcement stating that media witnesses were being removed from the area.

Tennessee Department of Corrections spokesperson Dorinda Carter told media witnesses that they could not immediately provide information about what had occurred.

Pike's attorneys filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday afternoon seeking to halt and stay the execution, stating it involved “unnecessary pain” and violated her rights to be executed without cruel and unusual punishment.

They also filed appeals in the Sixth Circuit and District Court.

The motion also insisted that the Department of Corrections begin emergency measures: “Failure to provide such care represents a willful disregard for the serious medical needs of the inmates.”

Pike and her friend were found with a knife and a fatal beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a job training center in Knoxville.