Tennessee governor suspends all executions after Christa Pike’s lethal injections fail | Tennessee

Tennessee’s governor has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent investigation after a failed attempt to put a condemned man to death Wednesday night.

Witnesses in the Nashville execution chamber said Christa Pike, convicted of murder, was still awake and snoring loudly about 40 minutes after authorities gave her two doses of the deadly drug pentobarbital.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections said she was taken to an off-site medical facility. His condition was unknown Thursday.

Bill Lee, the state’s Republican governor, announced the suspension and investigation in a statement Thursday that appeared critical of prison officials.

“Enforcing a lawfully imposed sentence is among the state’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be carried out in a manner that is not only lawful and constitutional, but also effective,” he said.

Lee said he demanded “a full third-party review to determine exactly what happened.”

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the botched execution attempt “singular and unprecedented,” according to the Associated Press.

She said her group knew that seven other people had survived health problems caused by the execution team’s inability to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but that no one remained alive after receiving the drugs used in those executions.

In May, Tennessee authorities canceled the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, another convicted murderer, after failing for more than an hour to place an intravenous line in his arm.

Pike, 50, sentenced to death for the brutal murder of a teenage classmate in 1994, was to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

The attempted execution was authorized only after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened Wednesday evening to lift a federal court stay issued earlier in the day, a delay it said was necessary to assess whether Pike’s childhood sexual abuse allegations were fully considered during his 1996 conviction.

Pike’s attorneys filed an emergency petition with the Tennessee Supreme Court after the second dose of pentobarbital was administered, requesting a halt and stay of the execution, claiming she was suffering “unnecessary agony” and that the state was violating her right to be executed without cruel and unusual punishment.

In a later statement, they said: “Tonight, the State of Tennessee has once again failed to carry out a lawful execution.

“We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike turned out to be true: difficult access to veins, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, lack of emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains shrouded in secrecy,” the statement said.

“Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed of her condition.”

A representative of the state Department of Corrections defended its handling of the failed execution attempt.

“The Tennessee Department of Corrections followed every step of the state’s legal and established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” spokeswoman Dorinda Carter said in a statement.

“The lethal chemical injection called for in the protocol has always been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was performed this evening. Christa Pike was transported to an off-site medical facility.”

According to the AP, Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a second set of drug syringes to be administered “if the inmate is not deceased” after the first set. It does not specify what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Seven journalists who were at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution as witnesses described what they saw during a live broadcast by television station WVLT shortly after the execution chamber curtains were lowered for the last time.

They said Pike snored as corrections officers escorted them outside.

John North of ABC News affiliate WBIR said, “It looks like it didn’t happen the way it was supposed to. When we left the building, as far as we know, she was probably still alive.”

Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were 18 and 17 when they and another friend tortured and killed Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate of theirs from the Knoxville Job Corps, in January 1995, using box cutters and a rock.

The case made national headlines because of the ages of those involved and the brutality of the murder, in which Shipp carved a pentagram into their victim’s chest and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of his skull.

Pike never denied the murder and was later diagnosed with mental health issues.

“I was an 18-year-old girl with a mental illness. It took me many years to realize the seriousness of what I had done,” she said in a clemency petition that Lee and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected.

Lee’s stay order affects the only other execution scheduled in Tennessee this year. Gary Wayne Sutton has been on death row since 1996 for the murder of a friend and was scheduled to be executed on December 3.

The Associated Press contributed to this report