Death row inmate Christa Pike, who survived after being administered two lethal injections, remains in critical condition, unconscious and on a ventilator at a Tennessee hospital, her lawyers said on Friday, providing the first detailed account of her condition following Wednesday's failed execution attempt.
Hospital staff are working to save the life of the 50-year-old and clear pentobarbital from her system, her attorneys said in an emergency court filing seeking an order requiring the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve evidence related to the botched execution.
Pike, who was convicted of murder, remains critically ill, intubated and reliant on mechanical ventilation after receiving two intravenous doses of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, according to her lawyers.
The failed attempts to establish intravenous lines left both of Pike's arms "swollen, burned and blistered", apparently because pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, leaked into tissue beneath her skin rather than entering her bloodstream, the filing said.
"The veins had blown"
Pike's lawyers accused Tennessee corrections officials of ignoring warnings from her doctors that pre-existing medical conditions would make it particularly difficult to establish intravenous access.
They further alleged that at no point during the procedure did members of the execution team realise that the IV lines had not been properly placed.
"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," the lawyers said in the filing.
According to the defence team, witnesses to the execution heard Pike "crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure".
The filing provides the most detailed account to date of the medical consequences of the execution attempt, which Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said was carried out under the state's established execution protocol.
The incident marked Tennessee's second botched execution this year, prompting Lee to suspend further executions for the remainder of 2026 while an independent investigation examines what went wrong.
Calls for justice
Pike was convicted three decades ago for the torture and murder of 19-year-old fellow student Colleen Slemmer.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her then 17-year-old boyfriend and a female friend lured Slemmer, a fellow participant in the Job Corps vocational training programme, to a wooded area near Knoxville, where she was tortured and killed.
Pike's two accomplices avoided the death penalty. Her boyfriend received a life sentence, while the other defendant was given a suspended sentence in exchange for testifying against the pair.
Had the execution been carried out, Pike would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the first person in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States to be executed in the state for a crime committed as a teenager.
Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, told local media that the state had offered her "its sincere apology" for the failed execution, which she witnessed.
Martinez, who now lives in Florida and had launched a fundraising campaign to travel to Tennessee for the execution, told television station WJXX: "The only thing I wanted was justice to be served."
"Having endured more than 20 years of solitary confinement and a completed attempted execution by lethal injection, Christa is the person who has suffered the harshest punishment in the entire history of the death penalty in the United States," Randy Spivey, one of Pike's lawyers, said on Thursday.
Source: AMNA
