Tennessee Is Keeping Death Row Inmate Alive After Botching Her Execution

More than two days after her botched execution, convicted murderer Christa Pike was alive in a Tennessee hospital.

Pike, 50, was to have been executed Wednesday night in connection with a 1995 murder. However, despite being given at least two doses of the drug Tennessee uses for lethal injections — pentobarbital — she did not die.

“Hospital staff are working to save Ms. Pike’s life and to clear the pentobarbital from her system,” her lawyers wrote in a court filing, according to The New York Times.

In a separate statement, Pike’s lawyers said she was receiving treatment for “significant injuries to both arms.”

Luke Ihnen, who represents Pike through the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, said that “we are working closely with those closest to Christa to respect her wishes, safeguard her privacy and protect her rights as a patient during this extraordinarily difficult time.”

The emergency motion filed by Pike’s lawyers said the last they were told, Pike was “intubated, on a ventilator and remains unconscious.”

“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” the motion said.

“Instead of remedying this failure, TDOC elected to prepare a backup set of syringes (if they were not also prepared earlier that day) and then administered another lethal dose of pentobarbital,” the motion added. TDOC is the acronym for the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

Pike “could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly” the filing said, adding that she told corrections staff her arm “feels like it’s about to burst open.”

The motion said Tennessee committed a “manifest violation” of Pike’s constitutional rights and called its actions “reckless” and “incompetent.”

Should Pike survive, next steps are unclear, as noted by The New York Times.

Outgoing Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee has halted executions in the state for now, but Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn said that if elected, she would seek to execute Pike.

Pike’s lawyers have asked Lee to allow Pike to serve a life sentence in the aftermath of the botched attempt to execute her.

May Martinez, the mother of Pike’s victim, Colleen Slemmer, who was 19 at the time she was murdered, said she felt Tennessee failed her daughter and her family, according to WJXX-TV.

“All I wanted was justice,” Martinez said.

“It’s hard. I broke down in tears,” Martinez, who witnessed the failed execution, said. “She was laying on the table, talking, still laughing, picking up her head.”

“I said, ‘I don’t agree with what you guys are doing. Now I have to worry about her being out,’” Martinez said. “And then I brought up, ‘Is she going to come back to the prison?’ ‘I don’t know what we’re doing with her yet.’ That’s the answers I got.”

“I said, ‘Here we are, 31 years, and you’re laughing in my face again,’” Martinez said. “And that’s what I feel like they did.”

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