Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday after administering two doses of the sedative pentobarbital, prompting Governor Bill Lee to order a third-party review and pause the state’s one remaining scheduled execution for the rest of the year. death
Pike, 50, was still alive and audibly snoring hours after the lethal injection began, according to her attorneys and journalists who witnessed the attempt, and was transported from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to a hospital by ambulance. Her legal team said they had not been given information on her condition as of late Wednesday. Prison officials closed the viewing curtain separating Pike from media witnesses at 7:46 p.m. local time, raised it briefly three minutes later when witnesses reported hearing her snoring loudly, then closed it again at 8:06 p.m.; witnesses continued to hear snoring until the microphone was switched off around 8:53 p.m. and they were told to leave.
ATN, New York has gathered that Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a second set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set, but the protocol does not specify what happens if the condemned remains alive after that second dose — the exact scenario state officials found themselves facing Wednesday night. The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that staff “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” a claim that leaves open why the protocol itself produced an outcome it does not appear to have anticipated.
Lee ordered what he called “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred,” announcing that the next scheduled execution would not proceed before year’s end. “Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” Lee said in a statement. A death penalty researcher described the failure as unprecedented, noting that while seven other people have survived medical complications tied to execution teams’ inability to access a vein, no one is known to have remained alive after actually receiving the lethal drugs themselves.
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Wednesday’s attempt followed a legal fight that extended into the execution’s final hour. The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay roughly 60 minutes before the procedure was set to begin, ruling that further review was needed into whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered during her original sentencing. The US Supreme Court vacated that stay hours later without explanation from its conservative majority, clearing the way for officials to proceed; its three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that lifting the stay “unnecessarily prevents” the appeals court from giving Pike’s claim the consideration it was due. Tennessee’s attorney general had argued that further delay would traumatize the family of Pike’s victim and reward what the state called “abusive delay tactics.”
Pike was convicted of the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a Knoxville job training facility whom Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, fatally stabbed and beat. Shipp, 17 at the time of the crime, received a sentence of life with the possibility of parole; Pike, who was 18, was the only one of the two sentenced to death. She does not dispute committing the killing, but her attorneys argued the jury that sentenced her never had the opportunity to weigh her age, her later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, or her allegations that she was raped beginning in early childhood. “It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the criminal justice system is poised to execute a survivor of rape and child sexual abuse whose jury never had the opportunity to consider those facts in weighing the defendant’s moral culpability,” her lawyers wrote in a court filing.
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In a clemency petition, Pike described the killing as a frenzied attack she was unable to stop once it began. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” she said in a statement. Slemmer’s mother has said she wants Pike’s death sentence carried out after waiting decades for the execution to proceed.
Had it succeeded, Wednesday’s execution would have made Pike the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and only the fourth woman executed in the state’s history. Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been executed nationwide, representing roughly 1% of all executions carried out in that period, the center’s data shows. No new date has been set for Pike’s execution, and officials have not said how long the third-party review Lee ordered is expected to take.
