Christa Pike probably had an all-female execution staff, her attorneys said at the presser they held via Zoom on Thursday afternoon.
“What I saw was consistent with that,” Randy Spivey said in response to a participant’s question about whether the execution team was composed of women — as Pike had requested, claiming that being put to death by a man would be too traumatizing.
The team spent an hour trying to set two IV lines for the lethal drugs, he said.
Follow live updates on murderer Christa Pike, the first death row inmate in history to survive lethal injection
The drugs may have been injected into Pike’s arm muscle rather than a vein, another of her lawyers, Stephen Ferrell, added.
A theory that the deadly chemicals didn’t enter a vein directly “sounded to me very consistent with what our medical experts predicted was likely to happen,” Ferrell said, based on Pike’s known medical conditions that included blown veins.
