Pike remained in critical condition, intubated and hooked to a mechanical ventilator to breathe, her lawyers said, after two doses of pentobarbital were administered to \u200bher intravenously at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital.<\/p>\n
The bungled attempt to establish intravenous lines also left both her arms “swollen, \u200bburned and blistered,” the apparent result of the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeping into the tissues under her \u2060skin, the court filing said.<\/p>\n
‘VEINS HAD BLOWN’<\/p>\n
The lawyers accused Correction Department officials of shrugging off prior warnings from Pike’s doctors that pre-existing medical conditions \u2014 small veins and \u200ba blood disorder called thrombocytosis \u2014 would make placing IV lines especially difficult.<\/p>\n
“At no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not \u200bcorrectly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” her lawyers said in a filing in the Chancery Court for Tennessee’s 20th Judicial District.<\/p>\n
It said witnesses to the execution attempt could hear Pike “crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure.”<\/p>\n
The filing provided the fullest picture yet of the medical consequences \u200bof an attempted execution that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said followed the state’s established protocol.<\/p>\n It was the state’s second botched execution this year, prompting Lee to halt \u200bany further attempts to carry out the death penalty for the rest of 2026. He also ordered an independent review of what went wrong.<\/p>\n Pike, 50, was convicted three decades ago \u200cof first-degree \u2060murder for her role in the torture and killing of a 19-year-old vocational school classmate, Colleen Slemmer, at the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville in 1995, when Pike was 18.<\/p>\n She had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries, and the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in that state for a crime committed by a teenager.<\/p>\n Pike’s then-17-year-old boyfriend was tried as an adult and convicted of murder as \u200bwell, but received a life sentence with \u200beligibility for parole. A third schoolmate \u2060who was 18 at the time and acted as a lookout for the two others ended up testifying for the prosecution and received probation.<\/p>\n Lee earlier this week rejected a clemency petition seeking to commute Pike’s death penalty to a life prison \u200bterm without the possibility of parole. The petition argued for leniency, in part, on the basis of her childhood history \u200bof severe neglect, sexual \u2060abuse that included two rapes, and untreated mental illness.<\/p>\n The clemency petition also cited evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for her to control her impulses.<\/p>\n The US Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an 11th-hour stay of execution, which was issued earlier in the day by a federal appeals \u2060court to give \u200bmore time to weigh Pike’s claim that her childhood trauma was not properly considered in her \u200bsentencing.<\/p>\n In their filing on Friday, Pike’s lawyers urged the state Chancery Court to order preservation of evidence they said would show that state prison personnel violated her constitutional rights by subjecting her to cruel \u200band unusual punishment.<\/p>\n Rewrites with details from motion, more background, throughout<\/p>\n Reporting by Maria Cardona and Steve Gorman; Additional reporting by Andrew Hay, Jasper Ward and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Alistair Bell and Edmund Klamann<\/p>\n Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Christa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/KZ7YHOPGOZK2POLGZAEVMCC5VU.jpg\")
A picture taken on December 4, 2007 shows death row inmate Christa Pike entering a Knox County Criminal Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, US., obtained by Reuters on September 30, 2026. J. Miles… Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab<\/a> Read more<\/p>\n