USA: A Tennessee death row inmate, Christa Pike, has survived an attempted execution after officials administered two doses of lethal-injection drug pentobarbital, with the 50-year-old later taken to hospital.
Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to halt the execution after she remained alive following the injections, saying she had lost consciousness but still had a heartbeat and was audibly snoring.
An attorney for Pike told the BBC that she was being given life-saving treatment at a hospital after two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered.
The attempted execution took place at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville at about 8pm local time on Wednesday.
According to the Associated Press, prison officials administered a second dose after the first failed to kill Pike. Media witnesses later reported that she remained alive and was audibly snoring before witnesses were asked to leave the area.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, attacked after meeting her at a job-training camp for troubled teenagers.
Pike was 18 at the time of the killing. She had admitted responsibility for Slemmer’s death but said in a clemency petition that she had intended to beat Slemmer rather than kill her and was unable to “put the brakes on”.
The execution followed a series of last-minute legal challenges. The US Supreme Court ultimately allowed Tennessee to proceed after a lower court had temporarily paused the execution.
Pike’s lawyers had argued that the jury that sentenced her to death did not adequately consider mitigating evidence concerning her childhood sexual abuse. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee rejected her clemency request earlier in the week.
Following the failed execution, Lee ordered what he described as a comprehensive, third-party review of the incident and halted the state’s remaining scheduled execution for the rest of the year.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it had followed the state’s established execution protocol.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” department spokesperson Dorinda Carter told the Tennessean.
She said the protocol did not provide for additional procedures beyond those carried out after the second dose and confirmed that Pike had been transported to an off-site medical facility.
Pike’s legal team, however, alleged that problems with access to her veins and other issues contributed to the failed execution and argued that the state had been unprepared to provide emergency medical care when the procedure did not go as planned.
The attempted execution was the second in Tennessee this year to encounter serious problems. In May, the execution of Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed after staff were unable to find a vein through which to administer the lethal drug.
Medical expert Dr Joel Zivot, who told the BBC he had been retained by Pike’s legal team, said she may not have reached a sufficient blood concentration of pentobarbital to cause respiratory and cardiovascular failure. He also warned that delays in resuscitation could potentially result in brain injury.
Pike’s case dates back to 1995, when Slemmer was found dead in Knoxville, Tennessee. The murder attracted national attention after an inverted pentagram was found carved into the victim’s chest. Pike has denied carving the symbol herself.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, had travelled to Tennessee to witness the execution after waiting decades for Pike’s sentence to be carried out.
“It was a mess,” Martinez said after Wednesday’s failed execution, according to NBC News.
Pike would have become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years. Women remain a small minority of those executed in the United States: 18 women have been executed since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, compared with more than 1,600 men.
