For the second time in four months, Tennessee’s death penalty protocol has failed to work.
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, inmate Christa Pike was “alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison,” her attorney told Associated Press. Her condition was unknown late Wednesday evening.
Christa Pike
Just weeks ago, 40 health care professionals sent a letter to Gov. Bill Lee warning Tennessee’s execution protocol is medically unethical and should be revamped before further executions occur.
They were responding to the gruesome and botched execution of Tony Carruthers in May. Carruthers spent 90 minutes bleeding and writhing in agony as an attending physician made repeated unsuccessful attempts to insert an IV into the inmate’s chest after being unable to find useable veins in the arms, legs and feet. Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve after the ordeal.
“Since the botched execution in May of this year, people from diverse political backgrounds across Tennessee have called for a pause in executions to examine the problems with the execution process,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty. “These pleas were ignored. The state of Tennessee has shown the world it cannot be trusted to implement capital punishment in a way that preserves human dignity and the rule of law. This has to stop now.”
Pike had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday but an appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start. Hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay and the execution was rescheduled for around 7:30 p.m.
Prison officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital that did not kill her, her attorneys said in court filings.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told AP what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.”
The 50-year-old was sentenced to death for a murder she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Tennessee has been at the center of a national debate over use of capital punishment.
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