Christa Pike intubated and on ventilator after botched execution, new court filing reveals
An emergency court filing on Friday revealed Christa Pike is unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator with both arms swollen, burned and blistered two days after Tennessee's failed lethal injection, as her lawyers called the state's actions 'reckless' and sought commutation of her sentence.
Christa Pike is unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator nearly two days after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her, an emergency court filing revealed on Friday — with both her arms swollen, burned and blistered from the botched lethal injection.
The motion, filed in Davidson County Chancery Court on 2 October, seeks to preserve all evidence from the execution. It says that as of the night of 1 October, Pike remained in critical condition at a Nashville-area hospital, and that “hospital staff are working to save Ms. Pike’s life and to clear the pentobarbital from her system.”
“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 filing states. Rather than remedying the failure, the state “elected to prepare a backup set of syringes” and administered another lethal dose, the motion says — calling the state’s actions “reckless” and “incompetent” and a “manifest violation” of Pike’s constitutional rights.
Pike, 50, was set to be executed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on 30 September after surviving two doses of pentobarbital. According to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center, she is the first person in the history of capital punishment to survive after being injected with lethal drugs.
Her attorney Randy Spivey said Governor Bill Lee’s review of the protocol does not go far enough and called for commutation, saying Pike had endured punishment “greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol” and that the protocol’s drug “has consistently been effective.”
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.
Sources: The Tennessean | CNN | NPR
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