Christa Pike, the death row inmate who survived the state of Tennessee's attempt to execute her by lethal injection, is intubated, on a ventilator and unconscious in a hospital near Nashville.
According to her lawyers, Pike is receiving life-saving treatment after being injected with two doses of pentobarbital, a substance considered fatal in execution protocol. Her medical condition and legal future remain unclear.
Pike had been sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She was expected to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years, but Wednesday's execution fell through.
Tennessee's Republican Governor, Bill Lee, has announced that he will halt the last execution scheduled for this year while an independent investigation determines "what exactly happened" in the Pike case.
"The governor acted correctly by requesting an investigation. We need to know what happened," said Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office.
According to media witnesses present at the execution, Pike gave her last words at 7:26 p.m. After two doses of the lethal substance, she began to snore and appeared to still be alive.
“None of this was normal,” said WPLN reporter Catherine Sweeney, who has covered several executions in Tennessee. “We’ve never seen anything like this. It went very badly.”
The Tennessee Department of Corrections insists it followed every step of the official protocol approved by authorities. According to the institution, the protocol did not allow for any further interventions beyond those carried out that evening.
Pike's lawyers say they previously warned the court that problems with her veins could make the lethal injection difficult or dangerous. They claim that there was difficulty in finding the veins during the procedure, damage to them and a lack of emergency medical care at the time the execution failed.
One of the lawyers, Stephen Ferrell, said Pike's greatest fear was not death, but a prolonged, painful and traumatic death.
"This happened, only without death," he said.
The case has opened a serious legal dilemma: what happens to a convict who survives execution?
Death penalty expert Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College, told CNN that botched executions are not unknown in the US, but cases where an execution fails completely and the convict survives are extremely rare.
There are historical precedents. In 1946, Willie Francis, 16, survived the electric chair in Louisiana due to a technical glitch, but the Supreme Court later allowed a second execution. In Ohio, Romell Broom survived an attempted execution in 2009 after authorities failed to insert an intravenous line; he died of Covid-19 in 2020, still on death row.
But Christa Pike's case is considered more complicated because the deadly substance actually entered her body.
“We are in almost unprecedented territory,” Sarat said. “She survived her execution.”
