Christa Pike became the first death row inmate to survive lethal injection Wednesday in what an expert dubbed a “singular and unparalleled” event.
Pike, 50, was strapped to a gurney in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution’s death chamber just before 7:30 p.m. CDT and given two doses of pentobarbital, which failed to have the intended effect of stopping her breathing and heartbeat.
Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robin Maher said seven other condemned inmates survived medical issues that arose from the execution team failing to find a vein, but revealed no one has lived after being administered the lethal drug cocktail.
Maher said what happened to Pike was “singular and unparalleled,” and even seasoned media witnesses to the execution said what they saw was not “normal.”
After the second dose of the lethal drug cocktail failed, her lawyers filed an emergency motion for a stay of execution, arguing she was in “unnecessary agony,” which District Judge Clifton L. Corker approved.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee immediately ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and suspended the last remaining execution scheduled in the state this year.
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement it “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
Pike was sentenced to die in 1996 for murdering a classmate whom she lured to a remote area near the University of Tennessee campus with her boyfriend and then brutally beat and tortured before crushing her skull with a piece of asphalt.
State law dictates that a second dose of the lethal drug can be administered to a condemned inmate if the first dose doesn’t work, but there is no blueprint indicating what happens if the second should also fail.
With Post wires
