‘Christa Pike ‘Angry And Confused’ After Surviving Tennessee’s Failed Execution

Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, awoke “angry and confused” in hospital this week and faces a long recovery after surviving Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her, her lawyers said on Wednesday.

 

Pike, 50, was taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital a week ago, unconscious and critically ill, with severe injuries to her arms after two injections of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

 

As recently as Monday, her lawyers believed Pike was brain dead and that life support would be withdrawn the following day. Her failed execution was the second such incident in Tennessee this year, prompting renewed scrutiny of the state’s use of the death penalty.

 

“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” Randall Spivey, one of her lawyers, told reporters after a court hearing on Wednesday.

 

During the hearing, a judge ordered Tennessee officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the failed execution.

 

“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”

 

Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions in Tennessee for the remainder of the year while investigators examine the failed executions of Pike and Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to establish intravenous lines.

 

Pike remains seriously ill and shackled to her hospital bed, her lawyers said. She cannot swallow or eat and has pneumonia. Her hands and arms are “tremendously swollen”, leaving her unable to move them, and it remains unclear whether she will regain her mobility.

 

Although she continues to experience “cognitive confusion”, her lawyers said she has been speaking with people around her.

 

“She has wanted to know what’s happened, and she’s asked about several people,” Spivey said. “She’s asked about the victim’s family.”

 

Pike was sentenced to death for her role, as a teenager, in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.

 

Her lawyers say she is the first person known to have survived a completed execution attempt in the United States. They argue that the attempt amounted to a violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

 

A Unique Case

 

Pike’s lawyers are continuing their legal action against state officials, seeking greater transparency over execution procedures in Tennessee and challenging the secrecy that typically surrounds them.

 

Earlier on Wednesday, Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints.

 

Pike’s all-female execution team used at least seven needles during an ordeal that lasted more than two hours, her lawyers said. One needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.

 

Myles largely sided with Pike’s lawyers at the end of Wednesday’s hearing, describing the litigation, which began in January as part of efforts to prevent the scheduled execution, as unusual because no one had expected Pike to survive. “This case is unique, to say the least,” Myles said.

 

She also ordered the state to preserve internal communications relating to the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.

 

Myles has yet to rule on a request by Pike’s lawyers for the Tennessee Department of Correction to allow them to obtain any residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.

 

The Tennessee Department of Correction has opposed what it described as a “duplicative and unnecessary” preservation order, arguing that it is already legally required to preserve evidence and had already agreed to share most, if not all, of the material sought by Pike’s lawyers.

 

Tennessee and other US states have long struggled to obtain drugs used in executions. Major pharmaceutical companies generally do not supply them because of restrictions imposed by European countries on companies whose products are used in torture or executions.

 

Tennessee, like other states, has therefore turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to produce limited batches of execution drugs, while promising to keep their identities confidential.

 

“Today’s hearing was about transparency, about why Christa, the courts, the media and the public should not simply take the state’s word about what happened last Wednesday,” Luke Ihnen, another lawyer for Pike, told reporters after the judge’s ruling.

 

He repeated the call for Governor Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment and never attempt to execute her again. A spokesperson for Lee, who rejected a clemency appeal two days before the failed execution, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Pike’s lawyers had previously sought an alternative to lethal injection, arguing that her small veins and related medical conditions made her concerned that the execution could go wrong.

 

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