Conscious and speaking after the state failed to kill her: Christa Pike case forces Tennessee to halt executions

Christa Pike is conscious and speaking in a hospital bed, her lawyers said on October 6, less than a week after Tennessee tried and failed to execute her. She remains in critical care, with severe damage to her arms, and, in her lawyers' words, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed. Her prognosis is unclear, and any recovery is expected to be long.

The statement marks an extraordinary turn in a case that has already forced a state to stop and look at its own machinery. Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Instead, after two doses of pentobarbital, she was alive and was rushed to hospital.

Her lawyers say executioners struggled to place intravenous lines and that she had warned the state about difficult vein access. On October 2 they said she was unconscious, on a ventilator, with both arms swollen, burned and blistered while doctors worked to clear the drug from her body. The Tennessee Department of Correction has maintained that its team followed protocol and that the drug has consistently been effective.

Governor Bill Lee has halted the state's next scheduled execution, ordered an independent review to be led by former United States attorney Ed Stanton, and announced that the prisons chief, Frank Strada, will step down. A court hearing was scheduled for October 7, where Pike's lawyers were to ask Chancellor I'Ashea Myles to order the state to preserve evidence from the failed execution. They are also calling on the governor to commute her sentence to life in prison without parole.

The legal question, what a state may do after a person survives a complete execution attempt, now sits beside a simpler human one. Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center has said no one had previously survived the administration of lethal injection drugs in this way. Pike's lawyers call her the only person known to have survived a complete execution attempt in the United States.

None of this erases the crime, or the grief of Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, who was at the prison when the execution failed and had waited years for that night. But a punishment that inflicts terror, damages a prisoner's arms, sends her to intensive care and still does not kill her has failed on the state's own terms. Tennessee must now prove, with preserved evidence and an independent record, exactly what it did. Until then, the shackles on a hospital bed are the image this case will carry.