Tennessee officials failed to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection on Wednesday night after a divided Supreme Court cleared the way hours earlier, and the death row inmate was taken to a hospital, her lawyers said.
Execution witnesses brought into the death chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville said Ms. Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, appeared to be “very clearly alive” when they were escorted out, according to reporters for MS NOW. Prison staff had given her what appeared to be two doses of the sedative pentobarbital. Her lawyers said early Thursday that she was receiving medical treatment at a hospital and that they had not been told her condition.
The execution had been set for 10 a.m. Central time. About an hour before, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted what it called a “short stay of execution” so judges could weigh Ms. Pike’s argument that evidence of sexual abuse she suffered as a child was never fully considered when she was sentenced to death. Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, immediately asked the Supreme Court to vacate the stay, saying in its filing that the delay traumatized the victim’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics.”
On Wednesday night the justices set the stay aside, and the procedure began. Reporters watched as the curtain to the chamber closed at 7:46 p.m., reopened three minutes later and closed again at 8:06 p.m., according to MS NOW’s account. Ms. Pike could be heard snoring until the microphone was cut at about 8:53 p.m. Soon after, officials led the witnesses away, and an ambulance was seen leaving the prison.
“I cannot emphasize enough how much of whatever just happened happened behind a closed curtain,” Stephan Hale, a reporter for The Nashville Banner, said at a news conference. Dorinda Carter, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Correction, told the witnesses she could not immediately explain what had happened.
Late Wednesday, Ms. Pike’s lawyers filed emergency motions with the Supreme Court, the Sixth Circuit and a federal district court, saying she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the state should begin lifesaving measures. All were denied or dismissed as moot after she was moved to the hospital.
Ms. Pike, now 50, was 18 in January 1995 when she and two companions lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at the Job Corps training center in Knoxville, into a wooded area and killed her. According to court records, Ms. Pike struck Ms. Slemmer with pieces of asphalt and cut her with a box cutter over the course of at least half an hour. A pentagram was carved into the young woman’s body, and Ms. Pike kept a piece of her skull, telling a classmate it was a “souvenir.”
Ms. Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. The third person involved, Shadolla Peterson, testified for the prosecution and received probation. Ms. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
In her final days, her lawyers argued that her trial attorneys had never told the jury about her childhood: sexual assaults beginning before she was five, rapes at 11 and 17, and later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. The Tennessee Supreme Court denied a stay last week. Gov. Bill Lee rejected her 226-page clemency petition on Monday, and the Supreme Court turned down a stay on Tuesday.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” Ms. Pike wrote in a statement attached to the petition. “I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.” In a letter to her spiritual adviser this week, obtained by CBS News, she wrote: “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
Ms. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled from Jacksonville, Fla., to witness the execution and had asked that it go forward. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she said.
Had it gone ahead, Ms. Pike would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in at least 200 years. Women account for 18 of the 1,683 people executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. It was also Tennessee’s second failed execution this year. In May, officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers after workers tried for more than an hour to place an IV.
“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” her lawyers said in a statement. “The concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care was available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”