Corrections department says officials followed established protocol
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee for governor in Tennessee, called for Pike’s execution to be carried out. She also said the state should bring back the electric chair.
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerri Green said she would issue a moratorium on executions during her term if she was elected governor.
The contest over what happens to Pike is unfolding as Lee’s term ends in January. Lee told reporters this week that he suspects Pike’s sentence “will be the same as it was before, unless determined otherwise by the courts.” A representative for the governor didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said officials followed established protocol during the attempt. The department’s commissioner announced he would step down earlier this month after the failed execution attempt.
Pike’s legal team has called on the governor to commute her death sentence to life in prison. Lee halted all executions in the state for the remainder of the year and ordered an independent review of the incident.
Pike, 50 years old, said she is still in pain and struggling to understand what happened after she survived the botched execution one month ago. “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts,” Pike said Friday in her first comments since the failed execution. “The pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
In a statement dictated to her legal team, Pike said she entered her scheduled execution on Sept. 30 at peace and woke up several days later at a hospital, “confused and in pain.” Pike is now back at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville. She is isolated in the prison’s medical ward, she said in her statement.
“I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” Pike said. “I continue to think about my victim’s family and the terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
“I don’t know why I survived that night,” Pike said. “I don’t know what comes next.”
Pike survived her scheduled execution after receiving two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative that more than a dozen states use for capital punishment, in September. She was rushed to a local hospital, where she was intubated on a ventilator and eventually discharged.
Pike is the first person to survive after being injected with lethal doses of execution drugs, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Her botched execution has renewed scrutiny over lethal injection drugs and called the state system’s protocols into question. Pike’s lawyers previously said her small veins made it likely she would experience unnecessary suffering from lethal drugs.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike and two other teens, including her then-boyfriend, were charged in connection with Slemmer’s 1995 murder. Pike, who was 18 at the time, killed Slemmer, 19, by cutting her throat and smashing her skull with a piece of asphalt, according to court records.
Pike’s lawyers have said she is bipolar and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of physical and sexual abuse during childhood.