A woman on death row who received two doses of lethal injection drugs has been rushed to hospital after a botched execution attempt.<\/p>\n
Christa Pike was scheduled to be executed at a maximum security prison in Nashville at 10am on September 30, local time.<\/p>\n
Pike’s execution was delayed after a last-minute stay, with the Supreme Court ultimately clearing the way for it to go ahead a few hours later.<\/p>\n
Her legal team said she was still alive more than an hour after the execution drug was administered.<\/p>\n
“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” Pike’s attorneys said in a statement. “Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed as to her condition.”<\/p>\n
Witnesses were released from the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where the attempted execution was held.<\/p>\n
Emergency service teams were then seen outside the prison and reportedly left the area with lights and sirens blaring.<\/p>\n
Speaking to media, multiple witnesses from the execution chamber said “nothing we saw was normal”.<\/p>\n
They noted the process was “abnormally long”, with the curtain being drawn at multiple points throughout the lethal injection being administered<\/p>\n
Associated Press journalist Kim Chandler said she had witnessed many executions, but never one in Tennessee.<\/p>\n
“I would say that Pike appeared noticeably awake as the execution began,” she told media outside the prison.<\/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
Tennessee has since suspended executions for the rest of the year pending an investigation.<\/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
Ms Slemmer’s family were 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 attorney’s 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
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 at 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 which made lethal injection difficult.<\/p>\n
Tennessee’s history of executions<\/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
The team said they were 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 who received two doses of lethal injection drugs has been rushed to hospital…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-617332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}