American Christa Pike in critical condition after failed execution

The US American Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death, remains in critical condition after her failed execution in the US state of Tennessee. As several US media reported, citing local court documents, Pike was unconscious and on a ventilator on Thursday evening.

According to the New York Times, Pike was in critical condition in a Nashville hospital following the botched execution. At the time, hospital staff were working to save her life and remove the injected drug pentobarbital from her body, the newspaper quoted the 50-year-old's lawyers as saying.

Pike was supposed to be executed with a lethal injection on Wednesday evening, but survived two injections and was taken to a clinic. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered an independent investigation after the incident. He also suspended executions scheduled for this year in his state.

Pike's lawyers assume medical error

Pike's lawyers reportedly suspect faulty venous access was behind the complications. It could therefore be that some of the drug used entered the woman's body through the skin. Lawyers for those sentenced to death speak of blisters and burns around the injection sites of the syringes.

The case had already caused a stir before the failed execution because the state of Tennessee wanted to carry out a death sentence on a woman for the first time in 200 years. Her execution was preceded by a legal dispute: Shortly before execution, a court stopped the death penalty. Then the Supreme Court granted an emergency motion from the Tennessee Department of Corrections, thereby overriding the enforcement freeze imposed by a lower court.

Pike confessed to murdering a 19-year-old classmate in Knoxville in January 1995 at the age of 18. According to the investigation, together with her boyfriend at the time and a third person, she lured the victim into a forest area, tortured him and killed him. Pike was sentenced to death for the crime 30 years ago. Her boyfriend received a life sentence.

Pike's lawyers had argued in their appeal for clemency before the execution that the woman's psychological problems and a history of serious sexual abuse had not been sufficiently taken into account.

»I was a mentally ill 18-year-old. “It took me years to even realize the seriousness of what I had done,” Pike said in a statement accompanying her petition for clemency. “And even longer until I realized how many lives I had affected. I ended someone's life - a child's, a sister's, a friend's. It disgusts me now to think that I was capable of such a crime.”