A Tennessee woman convicted of murdering a schoolmate 30 years ago has been taken to hospital after surviving two attempts to execute her with lethal injections.
Witnesses reported that Christa Pike was still breathing despite the injections intended to kill her late on Wednesday. It was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year.
Her attorneys told a local news station: “This has turned into agony and a violation of Pike’s right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction later confirmed in a statement that Pike had survived the state’s effort to execute her: “The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.”
Pike had been transported to an “off-site medical facility”, they said.
In a press conference, media witnesses described hearing Pike snore 40 minutes after she was administered two doses of pentobarbital.
The failed execution is the second in Tennessee this year, after prison officials in May aborted attempts to execute a man convicted of murders after failing to find a suitable vein for his lethal injection.
Tennessee governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency petition on Monday, issued a statement after the botched execution, suspending all executions this year and calling for a “comprehensive, third-party review” of Pike’s execution attempt, according to Nashville’s the Tennessean.
Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10am local time on Wednesday for a killing she committed when she was 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, but hours later the US supreme court overturned that stay.
Pike’s attorneys have filed an emergency motion to the US supreme court asking to halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and the state is violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment.
Seven journalists who were in the room to witness the execution said afterward, on a livestream hosted by WVLT television station, that after the injection Pike was clearly alive and snoring before corrections officials escorted journalists out.
“It appears this did not go how this was supposed to go,” said investigative journalist John North of WBIR, who was a witness at the execution site. “When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive,” he said.
Earlier Pike, who was convicted of murder 30 years ago, had her execution halted by an appeals court in a 2-1 ruling, that said the delay was necessary to assess whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing. The state governor and the supreme court had earlier refused calls for clemency.
Tennessee’s attorney general immediately appealed against the ruling to the supreme court, writing that the 11th-hour stay rewarded “abusive delay tactics by Pike’s attorneys”, according to the Associated Press.
The US supreme court sided with Tennessee in an order signed by justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the court’s order “because its decision clears the way for the state to execute Pike before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered”.
Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps in 1995.
The case garnered nationwide headlines due to the ages of those involved and the brutality of the murder.
According to prosecutors, Pike was worried Slemmer was trying to take her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, away from her. Together, they lured Slemmer into a wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee on 12 January 1995. Pike cut Slemmer’s stomach and throat with a box cutter before smashing her head with a rock.
Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.
Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Pike has never denied her involvement in Slemmer’s killing and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize 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 that was included in her clemency petition.
On Saturday, May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, said she was waiting for Pike’s execution.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez told the Associated Press, adding: “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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