New Delhi: Christa Pike, the only woman on death row in the US state of Tennessee, has regained consciousness and is speaking after surviving an attempted execution by lethal injection on September 30, her lawyers said. Her recovery comes as her legal team seeks a court order to preserve evidence that could help establish why the procedure failed and whether it violated her constitutional rights.
The 50-year-old remains in hospital receiving critical medical care, with her long-term condition uncertain, according to a statement her lawyers released on Tuesday. They expect a prolonged recovery and say she remains handcuffed and shackled to her hospital bed despite serious injuries to her arms.
A status conference was scheduled for Wednesday, before the chancery court judge, I’Ashea Myles, in Nashville, according to AP. Pike’s lawyers want the prison authorities to retain drug lot numbers, needles, execution logs and other material connected with the attempt.
The Tennessee attorney general’s office opposed the request on Tuesday, arguing that an additional order was unnecessary because the prison system already had obligations to preserve the evidence for other proceedings. State lawyers also said officials had taken the necessary steps to obtain medical treatment for Pike and determine what had happened.
The failed execution took place at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where officials administered two rounds of pentobarbital under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol. As RNA Media previously reported, Pike complained of arm pain and continued breathing audibly before being taken to hospital, where she initially remained unconscious and dependent on a ventilator.
A central question is whether the drug entered her bloodstream as intended or leaked into surrounding tissue because of problems with intravenous access. Her lawyers have alleged that both arms were swollen, burned and blistered, but the precise cause of the failed execution remains unresolved.
The legal team had raised concerns before the execution about Pike’s small veins and a blood disorder, arguing that these could make intravenous administration difficult and painful. Nashville public radio station WPLN reported that the Tennessee supreme court had rejected those concerns as speculative and insufficient to establish a rights violation.
The Tennessee department of correction has defended its actions, saying in an official statement that staff followed every step of the approved execution protocol. It also said the protocol permitted no additional procedures beyond those attempted that evening, leaving investigators to examine both its implementation and its provisions for an unsuccessful execution.
The procedure allows a second round of pentobarbital if the first does not cause death but does not specify what should happen if the second round also fails, according to a first-hand account by WPLN reporter Catherine Sweeney. Sweeney, one of seven media witnesses, described hearing Pike continue to breathe after curtains obscured the chamber and before journalists were ordered to leave.
The governor, Bill Lee, ordered an independent investigation and postponed Tennessee’s remaining execution scheduled for this year. His intervention followed his earlier refusal to commute Pike’s death sentence.
The commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction, Frank Strada, subsequently announced that he would leave his position at the end of October. Lee appointed the former US attorney, Ed Stanton, to examine whether officials followed the protocol and whether further changes were needed; Stanton had also conducted the state’s 2022 review, which prompted a substantial revision of its lethal injection procedures.
Pike’s case was Tennessee’s second failed execution attempt this year, following an unsuccessful effort to establish intravenous access for Tony Carruthers in May. The two incidents have renewed scrutiny of a process already revised after earlier problems with the testing of execution drugs.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational training centre in Knoxville, the previous year. She was 18 at the time of the crime and would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Her clemency campaign has cited severe childhood abuse and diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder as grounds for commuting her sentence. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has opposed clemency and said the failed execution denied her daughter justice, while Pike’s lawyers continue to seek commutation.