Christa Pike unconscious, on ventilator after botched execution: Lawyers

The Tennessee woman’s legal team says doctors are working to clear doses of the drug pentobarbital from her system.

Christa Pike has been placed on a ventilator and intubated after surviving a failed execution attempt, according to a court filing from her lawyers.

The Tennessee woman, they wrote on Friday, “remains critically ill” and is unconscious while receiving treatment at a hospital in Nashville.

According to the filing, medical staff are working to save Pike’s life and clear her system of the two doses of the drug pentobarbital, which the US state uses to execute prisoners.

“Upon arrival, both of her arms were swollen, burned, and blistered,” Pike’s lawyers wrote about the drug’s effects on her body.

The filing, which was part of an emergency request by Pike’s lawyers to preserve state records related to her execution, marks the most detailed update on Pike’s condition after she was transported by ambulance to hospital from a Tennessee prison on Wednesday, following the botched attempt.

Pike’s lawyers argued that problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.

“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,” they wrote.

The lawyers allege prison staff prepared “a backup set of syringes” and “administered another lethal dose of pentobarbital”.

Pike, who was sentenced to death at 18 after she was found guilty of torturing and murdering another young woman in 1995, would have been the first woman in more than 200 years to be executed in Tennessee. She was also the only woman on the state’s death row.

Pike’s lawyers have called for her sentence to be commuted to life in prison after she endured what they called “chemical torture”.

Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while the state investigates what happened.