Christa Pike survives Tennessee lethal injection; governor orders review and pauses executions in state

New Delhi: Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, survived an attempted execution on Wednesday, after receiving two doses of a lethal injection drug and was taken to hospital. The failed procedure prompted the governor, Bill Lee, to order an independent investigation and suspend the remaining execution scheduled in the US state this year.

Pike, 50, was due to be executed for murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995, when she was 18, and would have become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years, as RNA Media reported earlier. Instead, an execution delayed by competing court decisions ended with an ambulance taking her from Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

Journalists who witnessed the procedure said Pike continued breathing and making loud snoring sounds after officials administered the injections. They reported that those sounds remained audible when they were escorted out at 8.53pm local time, although closed curtains prevented them from seeing much of what happened inside the chamber.

Her lawyers said she was receiving treatment at a nearby hospital but that they had not been informed of her condition. They alleged that the attempt had exposed problems involving intravenous access, the drugs and emergency arrangements, but those allegations had not been established by an independent investigation.

The Tennessee department of correction defended its conduct, saying staff had followed every step of the approved execution procedure. In its official statement, the department said the protocol permitted no additional measures beyond those already performed and confirmed Pike’s transfer to an outside medical facility.

The state’s protocol provides for a second round of injections if the prisoner remains alive after the first, according to Tennessee Lookout’s reporting. However, it does not specify what should happen if the second round also fails, leaving a significant question for the review Lee has ordered.

Lee said a comprehensive examination by an outside party would determine what occurred, while stressing that executions must meet legal and constitutional requirements and be effective. His intervention followed his earlier refusal to grant Pike clemency, underscoring how the failed procedure shifted attention from her sentence to the state’s ability to carry it out.

The execution had originally been scheduled for 10am, but a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for the Sixth Circuit temporarily stopped it in a 2–1 decision. The court sought time to examine a pending challenge concerning the handling of evidence about Pike’s childhood sexual abuse.

The dispute involved Pike’s argument that her trial lawyer had failed to present sufficient evidence of that abuse during sentencing and that subsequent proceedings had been compromised by the state’s treatment of her account. After Tennessee recently acknowledged her childhood suffering, she sought to reopen an earlier federal judgment denying relief, arguing that the acknowledgment exposed a flaw in those proceedings.

Tennessee opposed the delay, arguing that Pike’s claims had already been unsuccessfully litigated and that Slemmer’s family had waited decades for the sentence to be enforced. The US supreme court subsequently lifted the stay, allowing officials to proceed that evening, with three justices dissenting.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the execution should not proceed before the pending legal questions received proper consideration. Her dissent said Tennessee’s wish to enforce the sentence immediately did not justify preventing the appeals court from completing its review.

Pike and Slemmer attended a Job Corps vocational training centre in Knoxville, and Pike was convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 when the killing occurred, received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole, a sentencing difference her lawyers have highlighted.

Pike has acknowledged her involvement in the killing, while her clemency campaign cited childhood trauma and later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, opposed clemency and said she wanted the death sentence carried out after decades of grief.

The failure also follows Tennessee’s aborted attempt to execute Tony Carruthers in May, when officials struggled to establish the intravenous access required by the protocol. Pike’s survival now adds a second incident this year to scrutiny of the state’s execution procedures, with both the cause of Wednesday’s failure and her medical condition still unresolved in the available reports.