Tennessee governor suspends executions after botched lethal injection leaves death row inmate alive

Tennessee’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes after receiving a double dose of the lethal drug that should have quickly killed her.

Bill Lee, a Republican, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after Wednesday night’s failed attempt to put to death Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, at the execution chamber in Nashville.

Meanwhile, Pike, 50, remained in the hospital on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care,” Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys, said at an afternoon press conference.

“She is in critical condition receiving life-saving care. That is the extent of what we have at the moment.”

Spivey, of the office of the post-conviction defender, condemned Tennessee authorities for the manner in which the failed attempt unfolded. He said officials used seven needles, one of which became bent as it was removed from Pike’s arm.

“Last night was not just inefficient, it was cruel and it was torturous. It was also predictable,” he said, adding that he saw no life-saving care given after the execution attempt was abandoned at about 8.25pm.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, Lee said he had spoken with Frank Strada, secretary of the Tennessee department of correction, but did not have an update on the condition of Pike, who was taken to an off-site medical facility after surviving two doses of pentobarbital.

“This is a tragedy,” Lee said, adding that he had not yet spoken to the families of Pike or the teenager she killed in 1995. “There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn’t have happened.

“It’s the most difficult of circumstances as it relates to the sentence that should have been carried out by the state. It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better than that.”

Lee added, in comments reported by the Tennessean, that he had not yet chosen an investigator to lead a “comprehensive, third party review” he announced in a statement late Wednesday.

“There are a lot of questions,” he said. “The people of our state deserve to have those questions answered. I’m highly disappointed, along with Tennesseans, about what happened.”

Cameron Sexton, the Republican speaker of Tennessee’s house of representatives, said on Thursday in a social media post that he and other lawmakers would also be investigating what went wrong with the attempted execution. He added that they would look at other ways to prevent executions from failing.

“We will look at all options – expanding the alternatives, and changing the current medications to include potassium chloride,” he said. “Thirty years is too long for justice.”

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said her group was aware of seven other people that have survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but nobody had remained alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions.

“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” she said in a statement.

“What happened to Christa Pike can be attributed to the extreme secrecy Tennessee officials have maintained about their execution procedures, their refusal to answer reasonable questions and their unwillingness to accept responsibility for their mistakes.”

In May, Tennessee officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, another convicted murderer, after failing for more than an hour to place an intravenous line into his arm.

Pike, who was sentenced to death for the brutal 1994 killing of a teenage classmate, was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

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

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion to the Tennessee supreme court after the second pentobarbital dose was administered 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.

A representative of the state corrections department defended its handling of the unsuccessful execution 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 AP, 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.

Seven journalists who were present at the Riverbend maximum security institution 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.

They 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.”

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.

The case garnered nationwide headlines due to the ages of those involved and the brutality of the murder, in which 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,” she said in a clemency petition that Lee and the US supreme court denied.

Lee’s suspension order affects the only other execution set 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 3 December.

The Associated Press contributed reporting