US appeals court pauses execution of Tennessee woman<\/a><\/p>\nThe execution, which was halted an hour before it was scheduled to go ahead, would have been the first time a woman had been subjected to the death penalty in more than 200 years.<\/p>\n
“The blinds were closed for the first time to the execution chamber at 7:46pm, they opened again at 7:49pm.<\/p>\n
“Her mouth fell open a few times and she began to loudly snore. She gasped a few times.<\/p>\n
“The curtain to the execution chamber closed for the final time at 8:06pm and she could be heard loudly snoring, clearly very alive, in the chamber until media witnesses were told to leave the area at about 8:53pm.”<\/p>\n
Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death for a murder committed when she was 18 years old.<\/p>\n
She was convicted of killing Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at a training program.<\/p>\n
Pike said she had become convinced Ms Slemmer had been trying to steal her boyfriend, who was later sentenced to life in prison for his role in the murder.<\/p>\n
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Photos of Colleen Slemmer were placed in the area where a press conference was held. (\u00a0AP Photo: George Walker IV)<\/p>\n
Ms Slemmer’s family was set to speak outside the prison alongside Texas Department of Corrections officials.<\/p>\n
Neither party appeared, and media assembled outside the prison for a press conference were told they had one hour to vacate the area.<\/p>\n
Pike’s lawyers call for emergency stay of execution<\/p>\n
Pike’s attorneys have filed an emergency petition to halt and stay the execution.<\/p>\n
Court documents alleged Pike was administered two syringes of the execution drug pentobarbital, but was still alive.<\/p>\n
“Ms Pike has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring,” they wrote.<\/p>\n
Her attorneys spoke to local media, saying she needed “immediate medical care”.<\/p>\n
Prior to her execution, Pike said in a letter to NBC she was not afraid to die.<\/p>\n
“I’m only nervous about the process,” she wrote.<\/p>\n
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In one of her final requests, she asked for an all-female execution team.<\/p>\n
Her lifelong history of sexual abuse and violence, according to court documents, left her terrified by the idea of being held down by men in her final moments.<\/p>\n
Her legal team had argued the procedure would be torturous, noting “small veins” and other conditions that made lethal injection difficult.<\/p>\n
Pike’s lawyers have since issued a statement accusing the state of failing to carry out a lawful execution “once again”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be true,” the statement said.<\/p>\n
“Difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”<\/p>\n
They added Pike was being treated at a nearby hospital, but said they had no information as to her condition.<\/p>\n
The Tennessee Department of Corrections said its staff had followed state protocol.<\/p>\n
“The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening,” a state spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Tennessee’s history of executions<\/p>\n
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered all 2026 executions be paused following Pike’s hospitalisation.<\/p>\n
He has called for a “comprehensive, third-party review” of the execution attempt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gary Wayne Sutton was scheduled for execution on December 3.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is not the first time this year Tennessee has seen a botched execution attempt.<\/p>\n
In May, death row inmate Tony Carruthers was given a one-year reprieve after the execution team failed to establish an intravenous (IV) line.<\/p>\n
How one man’s method became the death penalty standard<\/a><\/p>\nOn this day in history, the US carried out its first execution by lethal injection \u2014 a method thought up by one doctor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The team said it was unable to complete a back-up IV line or a central line, even after more than an hour of attempts.<\/p>\n
According to Carruthers’s legal team, the execution team punctured him more than a dozen times while trying to establish the IV line.<\/p>\n
Lethal injection, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, has the highest rate of being botched.<\/p>\n
In a 2022 annual review, the organisation found 35 per cent of the 20 execution attempts that year were “visibly problematic”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman on death row in the US state of Tennessee is still alive after two doses of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":911858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[479343,479344,43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-911857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-christa-pike","tag-colleen-slemmer","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/911858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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