The American Christa Pike is in hospital after two failed attempts to execute her with so-called lethal injection. As eyewitnesses to the planned execution said, the convicted murderer was given two doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital within about 60 minutes on Wednesday evening (local time) in the execution room of the Riverbend prison in the southern state of Tennessee. When Pike remained alive almost 40 minutes after the second lethal injection, the witnesses, including relatives of her victim, had to leave the visiting room.
“Pike has lost consciousness, but shows a heartbeat and is snoring audibly,” said the fifty-year-old's lawyers in an urgent application for a stay of execution on Thursday night. “The state failed to lawfully carry out an execution tonight,” said lawyers Kelley Gleason and Stephen Ferrell. "Ms. Pike's fears came true: her veins were difficult to reach, the pentobarbital was of poor quality and the execution procedure was nebulous." Pike is receiving medical care at the hospital, prosecutors said. The authorities have not yet commented on the state of health of the death row candidate.
Convicted of a brutal murder
Pike, who was brought to the execution chamber on Wednesday night as the first woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years, was sentenced to death in the spring of 1996. Together with a boyfriend and a friend, the then eighteen-year-old lured a classmate at the Job Corps vocational school in Knoxville, Colleen Slemmer, into a forest and tortured her with a box cutter for 30 minutes.
One of Pike's accomplices, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17 years old, carved a pentagram, a symbol of protection against witches and demons, on the victim's chest before his death. Pike ended up killing Slemmer with a chunk of asphalt. She took a piece of the eighteen-year-old's skull with her as a souvenir. After her arrest two days after the crime, Pike admitted that she killed Slemmer out of jealousy. She allegedly feared that the student would have a romance with her boyfriend and accomplice, Shipp. Shipp was later sentenced to life in prison, and Pike's accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, was given a suspended sentence.
Sexually abused as a toddler?
As is common practice after death sentences in the United States, Pike's lawyers have filed repeated appeals over the past decades. They based most of their submissions on the death row candidate's childhood, which remained unmentioned during the high-profile murder trial.
According to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, which has been campaigning for years to commute Pike's death sentence to life imprisonment, the 50-year-old was sexually abused for years as a toddler by her grandmother's partner. As an eleven-year-old, Pike is also said to have been raped by a neighbor. More attacks followed. The mother's changing partners also allegedly regularly abused the girl without the family or teachers intervening.
The stay of execution was lifted a few seconds later
Psychiatric evaluations pointed to possible post-traumatic stress disorder and abnormal mood swings, according to Pike's attorneys Gleason and Ferrell. After further submissions from lawyers, a district court in Tennessee temporarily suspended the execution on Wednesday.
Gleason and Ferrell had justified the request, among other things, with Pike's thrombocytosis, a pathologically elevated number of blood platelets, which in certain circumstances made a lethal injection in their client's case an unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Supreme Court of the United States overturned the stay of execution a few hours later.
There has been debate in the United States for years about the drugs used for “lethal injections”. Since industry groups such as the American Pharmacists Association have refused to provide poison cocktails for executions, some states are now commissioning less strictly controlled pharmacies to produce them.
Where the pentobarbital used on Pike came from remained unclear for the time being. The Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, who had previously rejected the 50-year-old's request for clemency, announced that he would no longer carry out death sentences until the end of the year. “We are having what happened examined – comprehensively and by third parties,” said the Republican on Thursday night.
