Christa Pike on ventilator and unconscious after failed execution, her lawyers say
Christa Pike remained in a hospital where she was on a ventilator and unconscious after her failed execution in Tennessee, her attorneys said in a court filing Friday.
Video above: How can a lethal injection go wrong?
Hospital staff were working to save Pike’s life and “clear the pentobarbital she was administered from her system” as of late Thursday, the attorneys said.
TENNESSEE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION via AP
Christa Pike
Pike was given two doses of the drug in a failed attempt Wednesday to execute her.
In the court filing, Pike’s attorneys said they believed problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” they wrote.
They wrote that instead of “remedying this failure,” they prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes.
State officials have not offered any explanation about what went wrong during the execution attempt
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee demanded a review of the state’s execution procedures and indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and another one slated for this year. Other Republican political leaders in Tennessee said the state should review whether to stop single-drug lethal injections and consider other options to carry out death sentences.
The execution team worked for an hour to administer the lethal drugs, said Pike’s defense lawyer Randy Spivey, who counted at least seven needles in her left arm.
Neither the initial nor the backup dose of pentobarbital worked. Pike was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the attempt.
