Christa Pike’s lawyers warned her execution would be ‘difficult and possibly cruel’ because of her veins | Death penalty

A former lawyer for Christa Pike said he was not surprised that Tennessee botched her execution attempt because lawyers had warned that problems accessing her veins could make the procedure dangerous and potentially cruel.

James Crowson, who represented Pike during part of his post-conviction appeals, said he had followed the case from afar before the failed execution at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Sept. 30.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” said Crowson, who represented Pike while working for the Tennessee Post-Conviction Defender. “I knew that there were a number of documents filed by the defense saying that she had compromised veins, and that this was going to be a difficult and possibly cruel procedure for her because it was going to put her in danger for exactly what happened.”

Pike, 50, remained hospitalized and on a machine helping her breathe on Sunday after Tennessee gave her two doses of pentobarbital that failed to kill her, to the knowledge of a lawyer who now represents her, the attorney said on CNN’s State of the Union.

“She’s still in the hospital, on a ventilator, seriously ill — we don’t really know the prognosis yet and we may not know for several days,” Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell told CNN host Jake Tapper.

Ferrell told Tapper he hadn’t been able to see Pike personally, but “that’s the extent of what we know.”

Pike’s lawyers say misplaced intravenous lines allowed the drug she was injected with to enter tissue rather than the bloodstream, leaving both arms seriously injured.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections says it follows every step of the state’s legal execution protocol. And the department said protocol did not allow for additional procedures after the steps taken Wednesday.

Crowson said accounts that officials followed written protocol and that the execution was seriously mishandled are not necessarily contradictory.

“The state comes up with a protocol and generally states that are inclined to impose the death penalty don’t really include medicine or science in the discussions when they develop these protocols,” he said.

Crowson said the reported injuries appeared consistent with concerns raised before the execution, citing the theory that the drug entered surrounding tissues instead of circulating properly in Pike’s bloodstream.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Knoxville Job Corps classmate. Pike was 18 at the time. Her boyfriend and co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and ineligible for the death penalty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This punishment gap based on a small age difference remains important to Crowson. He said it illustrates what he sees as the capricious nature of capital punishment.

“She is a few months older than the young man who engaged in the same behavior, and she has been fighting for her life for 32 years now,” Crowson said. “He is still in prison, but has not been sentenced to death.”

He said Pike’s turning age of 18 “seems to be an arbitrary number.”

Crowson represented Pike during a phase of his post-conviction case about 16 years earlier and said he visited him “dozens of times” on death row. He said he last spoke to her in 2009.

He described Pike at the time as “very superficially charming” and attentive to the people around him. But he said the person he knew bore little resemblance to the teenager whose crime sent her to death row.

“I never saw the Christa who committed these crimes that put her in prison,” Crowson said. “This person obviously exists.”

The crux of the post-conviction appeal, he said, was ineffective assistance of counsel. His team argued that Pike’s original attorneys failed to adequately present evidence of his mental illness, brain damage and history of severe childhood abuse during the sentencing phase.

Pike ultimately exhausted her appeals without ever obtaining relief, despite evidence from her lawyers that she had been diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It took me many years to realize the gravity of what I had done,” Pike said in a previous request for clemency. “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It makes me sick now to think I had the capacity to commit such a crime.”

Crowson said more recently that “a lot of things were left out” at the time of Pike’s sentencing.

“Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. There are a lot of people who feel very strongly, and his crime was gruesome and horrifying.”

What happens next will depend on whether Pike ultimately survives the botched execution — and, if she does, the extent of any lasting injuries.

Crowson said he expects there will be intense pressure on Bill Lee, Tennessee’s governor, to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison if she recovers. If she suffered serious neurological damage, he said, questions about her competence would become central to any attempt by Tennessee to execute her again.

The fallout from the botched execution deepened Saturday when Lee announced that Frank Strada, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Corrections, would resign later in October. Lee ordered an independent investigation and suspended executions in the state for the rest of the year.

Strada’s resignation was a predictable consequence of a botched execution now under national scrutiny, according to Crowson, who said: “Anytime you have a disaster like this, there will be fallout.” »

Additionally, Pike’s execution was at least Strada’s fifth botched execution since 2022 in Tennessee as well as Arizona, where he previously worked, according to death penalty attorneys.

Crowson said he hoped Pike’s case would cause the government to take a closer look at the death penalty as a functional legal sanction. He said there is a clear pattern of people sentenced to death and their histories of trauma and mental illness not being considered during trial and sentencing.

“I think we as a nation have a strange relationship with mental illness,” he said. “It’s so often overlooked and mocked. It’s unfortunate.”