Christa Pike's execution failed in Tennessee: lawyers report broken veins and degraded drug

The execution of the death sentence of Tennessee inmate Christa Pike, sentenced to capital punishment for the killing of a peer when she was 18, would have failed. According to his lawyers, during the lethal injection procedure there were problems related to "broken veins" and a "degraded" drug. The woman is alive, "but in serious condition", and "is receiving treatment that can save her life", said one of the woman's lawyers, Randy Spivey, who asked Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike's sentence to life in prison without any time served. Lee has already denied this request once. “We don't know what the prognosis is at this time and we have very little up-to-date information on her condition, but we know she is alive and receiving life-saving medical care,” Spivey added. "What happened last night was not just a failure: it was cruel, it was torture. And it was also foreseeable," added the lawyer.

Problems during execution

In a statement, Pike's lawyers spoke of "difficulty accessing veins, broken veins, degraded Pentobarbital and lack of emergency medical care." Some witnesses heard by the American media also said they saw the woman continue to breathe after the lethal injection was administered. The media present reported that Pike, the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in the last 200 years, survived the two lethal doses of pentobarbital administered during the execution. Tennessee Department of Corrections officials did not publicly confirm the outcome of the execution, which involved the administration of two injections of pentobarbital, nor did they respond to a request for information from AFP. “This evening the State of Tennessee has once again failed to carry out a lawfully ordered death sentence,” Pike's attorneys said in a statement. "Christa is being treated in a nearby hospital. We have not been informed about her condition." At the procedure, scheduled in a maximum security prison in Tennessee, some journalists were also present as witnesses. "It appears that not everything went as planned," said John North, a reporter for the WBIR broadcaster. “When we left the building, as far as we knew, she was probably still alive,” he added in reference to the condemned woman.

The court's stop and the Supreme Court's green light

Yesterday, about an hour after the lethal injection, a federal court ordered the execution to be suspended at the last minute to give judges the opportunity to evaluate whether elements relating to the violence suffered by the condemned woman as a child should be considered as mitigating circumstances at the time of the trial. Subsequently, however, the Supreme Court gave the green light to the execution.

The murder and the conviction

Christa Pike was found guilty of killing Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps, a center that provided job training to youth from troubled families. Pike, an adult, was sentenced to death a year later, while Shipp was protected by the law against capital punishment and was sentenced to life in prison.

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USA, execution of Christa Pike suspended. She was convicted of murder