Governor halts all executions after Christa Pike’s botched lethal injection attempts in Tennessee
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions in the state after death row inmate Christa Pike survived two lethal injection attempts on Wednesday night in what has been dubbed an unprecedented failure.
Pike, 50, was alive and loudly snoring after being given two doses of pentobarbital. She was taken by ambulance from the prison and was being treated at a hospital, but her attorneys said they hadn’t been told about her condition.
She had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for a murder she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay.
“There are very few answers this morning. It’s very early,” Lee told reporters Thursday at an unrelated event, noting he had received no updates on Pike’s condition. “The people of our state deserve to have those questions answered.”
He called what happened “deeply disturbing” and said it appeared prison staff followed procedure.
Lee has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and said that the one 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 it “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.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.”
Seven other people have survived medical problems due to 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 such executions, she said.
Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney.
“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,” she said in her “last” words. She described herself as at peace.
But Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.
