Tennessee governor halts executions through year after Pike injection fails

Pike, awake after two pentobarbital doses, taken to hospital

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after condemned inmate Christa Pike survived two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital during an execution attempt Wednesday night at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The Tennessee Department of Correction said Pike was transported to an off-site medical facility; her condition was unknown on Thursday.

Lee announced the suspension in a statement early Thursday. “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. Lee said he had demanded “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”

Seven journalists who were present at Riverbend as witnesses described what they saw during a livestream hosted by WVLT television station soon after curtains in the execution chamber were lowered for the final time. The journalists said Pike was snoring as corrections officials escorted them out. John North, of ABC News affiliate WBIR, said: “It appears this did not go how this was supposed to go. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.”

The execution attempt was allowed to proceed only after the US Supreme Court intervened late Wednesday to lift a federal court stay issued earlier in the day, a delay the federal court said was necessary to assess whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her 1996 sentencing.

After the second pentobarbital dose, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to the Tennessee Supreme Court asking to halt and stay the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the state was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. In a later statement, the attorneys said: “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution. We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy. Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed as to her condition.”

A representative of the state corrections department defended the department’s handling of the unsuccessful attempt. “The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” the spokesperson, Dorinda Carter, said in a statement. “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. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility.”

According to the Associated Press, Tennessee’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 Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the botched execution attempt “singular and unparalleled,” according to the Associated Press. Maher said her group was aware of seven other people who had survived medical problems because an execution team failed to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but that no one had remained alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions.

The failed execution was the second time this year that Tennessee was unable to complete a scheduled execution. In May, officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, another convicted murderer, after more than an hour of failed attempts to place an intravenous line.

Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were 18 and 17 when they and another female friend tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps, in January 1995, using boxcutters and a rock. Shipp carved a pentagram into their victim’s chest, and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of her skull. Pike never denied the killing and was later diagnosed with mental health disorders.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a clemency petition that Lee and the US Supreme Court denied.

Lee’s suspension order affects the only other execution scheduled in Tennessee this year. Gary Wayne Sutton has been on death row since 1996 for the murder of a friend and was scheduled to be put to death on December 3.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.