Hospital staff have been working to save Christa Pike’s life after two failed attempts to execute her, lawyers have said.
On Wednesday, two doses of lethal injection pentobarbital were administered, but Pike, 50, remained alive with a heartbeat.
She was taken to a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, where, as of Thursday night, she was placed on a ventilator and was unconscious.
In a court filing today, her attorneys said they believe problems with the IV lines caused the fatal drug to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
They wrote: ‘Apparently, at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body.’
Rather than ‘remedying this failure’, they said, authorities prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes.
The execution team spent an hour administering the drugs to no avail, with defence lawyer Randy Spivey saying he counted at least seven needles in her arm.
Pike was audibly snoring and gurgling, as heard on the chamber’s microphone, and also complained of pain, journalists who witnessed the failed execution reported.
At one point, she remarked, ‘My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,’ then asked, ‘Does this happen like that?’
She also kicked her feet repeatedly, knocking off the sheets placed over her.
As both sides of the death penalty case now continue demanding answers, the State’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, has ordered ‘a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred’.
Lee told press yesterday morning that he was uncertain of Pike’s current condition and said he was ‘disappointed about what happened last night’.
‘Tennesseans deserve a justice system that is fair, that’s consistent, [and] that is faithfully administered,’ he said.
‘My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead.’
A spokesperson for the Department of Correction insisted that ‘every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol’ is approved by the Attorney General’s Office.
They said ‘the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective’.
In the meantime, Pike’s execution has been indefinitely postponed, as has another scheduled for later this year.
She previously requested to be executed by a firing squad, but that is not provided to inmates in Tennessee. The electric chair is the second option.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996, aged 20, and was one of the youngest-ever women to receive a death sentence in the United States.
In 1995, she murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom Pike and two other friends led into the woods and brutally tortured.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has called this week’s botched execution ‘a mess’.
Martinez, who was in the witness room with her husband, Raul Martinez Jr., told People: ‘If I could have gotten in that room, I would have taken the box cutter and cut her up like she did Colleen.’
On her three decades of grief, she added: ‘Well, you miss a lot. You miss the holidays, you miss the birthdays, you miss Mother’s Days and stuff like that.’
Pike was to become the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years.
Instead, she’s become the first person ever to survive two lethal injections.
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