Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, survived an attempt to execute her by lethal injection on Wednesday night. Two doses of pentobarbital were not enough to kill her, the procedure was stopped and the inmate was taken to a hospital, where doctors are now fighting to save her life.
The execution began at 8 p.m. at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The condemned woman was given two intravenous doses of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate used in so-called death injections. The drug did not cause her death. A medical examination found that she had merely lost consciousness – her heart was still beating and loud snoring could be clearly heard.
Pike’s lawyers reacted immediately, filing an urgent motion to halt the rest of the procedure. The woman was transferred to a hospital, where medics are making efforts to save the life of a person sentenced to death.
Warnings that were ignored, the defence says
Pike’s legal team puts the blame for the incident on the authorities of the state of Tennessee. The attorneys argue that their client’s warnings about a potentially botched execution were dismissed. The case, they stress, went exactly the way she had predicted.
– We do not take pleasure in being right, but the concerns voiced by Ms Pike turned out to be true: difficult venous access, burst veins, the degradation of pentobarbital, the absence of immediate medical assistance when something inevitably goes wrong, all of it inside a protocol kept secret – the lawyers said in a statement cited by the BBC.
The state Department of Correction rejects those arguments. It insists that every procedure was carried out properly and that the execution followed the rules in force in Tennessee.
– The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step in accordance with the law, the established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office – said Dorinda Carter, a spokeswoman for the institution.
A medical expert points to a dose that was too low
Dr Joel Zivot, a physician hired by Christa Pike’s legal team as a medical expert, said the level of pentobarbital in the condemned woman’s blood was not sufficient to trigger the effects needed to cause death: respiratory arrest and cardiovascular failure. In his view, medical assistance was given to the inmate with a delay, which will most probably end in brain injury.
The 1995 murder that put her on death row
Christa Pike is the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee. Her case dates back to 1995 and concerns the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike, who was 18 at the time, was staying with the victim at an educational camp for troubled teenagers.
Together with her boyfriend at the time, she beat and tormented the 19-year-old and eventually killed her. An inverted pentagram, a symbol associated with the occult, was carved into the victim’s body. The killing caused a media storm on the wave of the so-called satanic panic – a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States built on widespread but unfounded fears about mysterious rituals allegedly performed by satanists.
In reality, the motive for the murder was said to be a suspicion that the 19-year-old wanted to „steal” the boyfriend of her younger friend. Pike denied that she was responsible for mutilating the teenager. In a statement issued years later, she explained that she had been struggling with mental illness.
– It took me many years to even realise the gravity of what I did. Even longer to accept how many lives I affected. I took someone’s child, a sister, a friend. Now I am disgusted at the thought that I was capable of committing such a crime – she wrote.
Źródło: Polsat News, Fot. Polsat News
