Death Row Prisoner Withstands Two Lethal Injections

Tennessee tried to execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday night and could not do it. Officials gave her two doses of pentobarbital. She was still alive and snoring when witnesses were led out, and she was later taken by ambulance from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to a hospital.

Her attorneys said she was being treated at a nearby hospital and that they had not been told anything about her condition. "Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution," they said in a statement.

Gov. Bill Lee ordered "a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred" and said the state's remaining scheduled execution will not be carried out 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," Lee said.

Pike, 50, was the only woman on Tennessee's death row. She was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at a job training program in Knoxville, and would have been the first woman put to death by the state in more than 200 years.

Robin M. Maher: "singular and unparalleled"

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike went through is "singular and unparalleled." Seven other people have survived medical problems caused by an execution team's failure to get access to a vein, she said, but no one has stayed alive after actually receiving the drugs used in lethal injections.

Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

What media witnesses saw and heard

Media witnesses were let into the witness room at 6:26 p.m. The curtains to the execution chamber went up at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney. She talked far more than witnesses expected. She sang a song with the words "I love you" alongside her spiritual adviser, Rev. Mikey Noechel.

"I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life. And that is with love," Pike said in what she believed were her last words. She described herself as at peace. "I'm at peace, I'm ready to be free. This is a happy day," she said, according to the Nashville Banner, which had a reporter in the room.

She stayed awake. At 7:34 p.m., witnesses heard her say, "My arm feels like it's about to burst open," said Tori Gessner, a reporter and anchor at WKRN in Nashville who has witnessed five executions in the state. Pike then talked about that spot on her arm and asked, "Does this happen like that?" Gessner said. Noechel told her to relax. "I'm trying," she answered. She smiled and laughed, and a tear ran down her right cheek.

Journalists also described her kicking her feet so often that she knocked the sheets off herself. The curtain closed at 7:46 p.m. and Noechel was asked to leave. Three minutes later it lifted again and he was brought back in. Pike began to snore, and the snoring got louder. The curtain shut again just after 8 p.m. and stayed shut.

By 8:26 p.m., witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been given. They could not see anything by then, only listen. The microphone from the chamber cut out at 8:53 p.m. and the warden told them to leave. Pike was still breathing.

"Nothing about today was normal, typical, at all," Gessner said at a news conference afterward.

The protocol has no step three

Tennessee's lethal injection protocol calls for two syringes of 50 ml of pentobarbital. Pike got both. A secondary set is administered "if the inmate is not deceased" after the first. The protocol does not say what happens if the person is still alive after the second set.

The Tennessee Department of Correction sent a written statement after 11 p.m. "The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the State's lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General's Office," it read. "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. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility."

A department spokesperson did not answer an emailed question about whether Pike was alive. The agency declined to address the media in person after the attempt, just as it did in May after the aborted execution of Tony Carruthers. The department did not immediately say whether it would try again, or when. Pike's execution warrant was set to expire at midnight local time, which is 1 a.m. Eastern on Thursday.

An ambulance at 9:15 p.m.

An ambulance and a fire truck rolled up to the prison with lights flashing at 9:15 p.m., in the middle of the media witnesses' press conference. Reporters sat in near silence for five minutes, watching and filming. Several of the witnesses appeared shaken by what they had seen. The ambulance left at 9:28 p.m., followed by two white Department of Correction vans.

"We have a lot of questions," said John North, an investigative producer at WBIR television in Knoxville who was a media witness and had attended Pike's original trial. "And the Department of Correction has a lot of answers they need to provide the public."

"It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go," North said. "But we don't know that. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive."

Lawyers filed while she was still on the gurney

After 8 p.m., the Knoxville Federal Public Defender's Office confirmed Pike had received both doses and that her heart had not stopped. The office filed with the federal district court and the Tennessee Supreme Court for a stay and for an order directing prison personnel to perform life-saving measures.

In a federal filing, her lawyers wrote that witnesses saw executioners inject "both syringes of lethal injection chemicals" and that Pike "has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat." The curtains, they noted, "have gone down twice." A late-night emergency motion to the Tennessee Supreme Court said she was in "unnecessary agony" and that her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment was being violated. Motions also went to the Sixth Circuit and a district court.

Two courts, one day, opposite answers

Pike was originally scheduled to die at 10 a.m. About an hour before, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit voted 2-1 to grant a temporary stay so it could consider whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully weighed at sentencing. The panel called it a "short" reprieve, granted "in order to properly analyze the parties' fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits."

The claim was not a new habeas petition. Pike's attorneys argued the state had changed its position on her childhood. At a special master hearing in August, a lawyer for the state said: "The state does not dispute the terrible things that Miss Pike suffered. I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Miss Pike."

Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office appealed immediately, telling the U.S. Supreme Court the execution needed to proceed to "avoid rewarding Pike's abusive delay tactics." The court dissolved the stay at 5:50 p.m. in a 6-3 decision. The majority did not explain its order. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that the move "interferes with the Sixth Circuit's routine administrative handling of a capital case and unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike's claim." Sotomayor added that she saw no reason to shortcircuit ordinary appellate review "particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision."

"It was a mess," the victim's mother said

May Martinez, Colleen Slemmer's mother, had traveled to Nashville hoping to watch the sentence carried out. "It was a mess," she said in a phone interview with NBC News early Thursday. "They went to try to execute her, and she didn't die."

Martinez said she was furious with the governor, the Department of Correction director and the attorney general. She said officials told the victims' family nothing. "They didn't say anything, and then, all of a sudden, they asked all the victims to leave. And we left," she said. "We didn't know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner. And he said that it didn't work, that it didn't work, and she's on her way to the hospital." She said Pike never expressed remorse during the attempt.

The 1995 killing in Knoxville

Prosecutors said Pike, who feared Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, lured her away on Jan. 12, 1995. Knoxville police said Pike and two teenage accomplices tortured, slashed and fatally beat Slemmer after luring her to an abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee. Pike cut her with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt.

The case drew national attention after investigators tied it to the occult because a pentagram had been carved into Slemmer's chest, and because Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim's skull as a "souvenir." Tadaryl Shipp, Pike's boyfriend, has admitted he carved the pentagram. He was 17 at the time and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike alone got death.

Pike has never denied her role. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after the killing. In her clemency petition she said she only meant to fight Slemmer and killed her in a frenzied attack when she could not "put the brakes on." "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done," she said in a statement. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said her sentence is an outlier, because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee have had death sentences vacated.

In a letter she wrote before learning Lee would not intervene, Pike wrote: "I am not afraid to die. I'm only nervous about the process."

The crowd on both sides of the fence

More than 60 people stood on the "against" side of the protester lawn Wednesday morning, about double the usual turnout. At least 15 stood on the "for" side, which often draws one person. A mother and daughter came from Manitoba, Canada, having followed the case for three decades.

Two Tennesseans on the pro-death penalty side talked about the abuse Pike suffered as a child. "It wasn't right," one said, "but this still needs to happen." Another man gestured across the fence: "People over there, if their 19-year-old daughter was almost decapitated and had a pentagram drawn on her chest, they'd feel a lot different."

Amanda Buck drove in from the Tri-Cities and got to the prison at 3 a.m. She spent a decade in prison on drug charges and knew Pike from segregation, where she said Pike made sure she had food, pens and paper. Pike once gave her a neck tattoo through the fence that separated them: chikara, the Japanese kanji character for "strength."

Tennessee's second failure this year

In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried for more than an hour to place an IV. Carruthers was granted a one-year reprieve. Media witnesses said the curtains never opened that night. This time they did.

Pike's lawyers blamed difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital and the absence of emergency medical care, all under a protocol they said remains secret. The Department of Correction says its staff followed that protocol exactly. Lee's third-party review is now the only official accounting the public has been promised.