By Jonathan Allen
Oct 1 (Reuters) - Christa Pike was critically ill and receiving "life-saving medical care" in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived two attempts by Tennessee to execute her with lethal injections, her lawyers said, renewing scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Her botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the second
this year in Tennessee, highlights the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections and finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.
"Christa is alive right now," Randall Spivey, one of Pike's lawyers who was a witness at the execution attempt, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. "We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now."
Her lawyers repeated their calls for Pike's sentence to be commuted to life in prison after enduring what they called "chemical torture." Tennessee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while it investigates the incident.
FAILED EXECUTIONS
While botched lethal injections are not rare, they usually involve difficulties at the first step: setting intravenous lines in the condemned prisoner's body. Pike's case is unusual in that prison officials appeared to succeed in injecting the drugs into her with two syringes, causing her right arm to "turn purple" and her skin to blister at the injection sites, Spivey said.
She appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her body, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit group in Washington.
"This failed attempt is the worst we've ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era," Robin Maher, the center's director, said in a statement.
After the second injection, Pike said her arm hurt and felt like it was "about to explode," her lawyers said, suggesting to them that the execution drugs had gone into her arm tissue rather than directly into the bloodstream.
Pike, who would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries, has a blood condition and feared that something would go wrong with lethal injections, her lawyers say.
Her lawyers unsuccessfully petitioned the state to consider alternative methods, such as death by hanging or firing squad.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike's clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday's failed attempt.
"There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen," Lee, a Republican, told reporters. "It's a tragedy, and it's deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we're going to make sure that happens."
'KIND' WITH HER EXECUTIONERS
Pike's lawyers shared new details about her time in the execution chamber, saying her request to prison officials for an all-female execution team appeared to have been honored.
During the hour or so it took to set up intravenous lines, Pike gave the executioners guidance on how they might try to place the needle to get better access to her veins, Spivey said.
"Miss Pike was kind and she was cooperative and she was at peace the whole time," Spivey said. "She was ready."
Even after the first dose was injected, Pike was speaking with her spiritual adviser and her executioners, wishing them "loving kindness," Spivey said.
Because pharmaceutical companies are forbidden by European law from selling drugs for use in executions, US prison systems typically rely on small, lightly regulated compounding pharmacies in procurement processes that are shrouded in secrecy.
Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. It was unclear where it procured the drugs for Wednesday's failed execution, information that Pike's lawyers say was also withheld from them.
Most countries in the world and 23 US states have abolished the death penalty, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Pike's case showed the rest of the country should follow suit.
"The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel," Turk said in a statement.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her. Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Emma Farge, Steve Gorman and Arlene Eiras; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Mark Porter)
