Huntsville, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee: two death chambers, one drug, a week apart. On Wednesday evening Texas executed Jamaal Howard, 46, condemned for the fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk more than two decades ago. As CNN’s Karina Tsui reports, he received a lethal dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m., according to the Associated Press.
After the drug was administered, the AP reported, Howard took a couple of breaths and gasped, then made snoring sounds that went quiet within 30 seconds. He was pronounced dead 19 minutes later. He was the 30th person executed in the United States this year — and the first since Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike with the same drug and failed.
On September 30, Pike too began snoring and moaning once the pentobarbital went in, according to media witnesses. But she kept breathing. The unconscious prisoner was taken to a Nashville hospital and placed on a ventilator, and on Tuesday her attorneys announced she was awake and speaking — a recovery they called “medically unprecedented.” In the aftermath, Tennessee suspended executions and ordered an independent inquiry.
Documents compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center show that both states’ protocols require syringes prepared with a 100 ml solution containing 5 grams of pentobarbital. Witnesses said Pike was given two doses. How many doses Howard received is unknown; CNN has asked the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for more information.
At least seven needles
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Her attorneys say the execution team struggled to place the IV lines — they had warned the state beforehand of the difficulty of finding her veins, and one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey, said she talked with the team about where to try inserting them. An emergency motion to preserve evidence, granted by a judge on Wednesday, states that those administering the injection attempted IV access with “at least seven needles,” one of which was “bent in a 90-degree angle when it was removed.”
When Pike reached the hospital, her arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” her attorneys said; the drug, they noted, “burns upon contact, including skin, tissue, and veins,” and they believe the IV failures sent it into her body rather than her bloodstream. The Tennessee Department of Correction says it followed its protocol, which approves a one-drug pentobarbital method and allows a backup injection if the inmate is still alive. There is no protocol for what happens if the second injection does not work.
Pike is “angry and confused about everything right now” but “very aware that the state tried to execute her,” Spivey told reporters on the sidelines of Wednesday’s hearing, adding that she has a “long road to recovery.” She has pneumonia and a blood clot in one arm, he said, and cannot swallow and therefore is not eating.
The courts and the campaign
Before Howard’s execution, his attorneys filed motions with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to stop it, arguing he was intellectually disabled and faced dangers like those in Pike’s case, since the same drug was being used amid fresh questions about its quality. The court denied the motions without comment.
Hours earlier in Tennessee, a judge had ruled the state must preserve all evidence from the failed execution: 911 calls, communications between state officials, physical material. The state said it had collected logbooks, medical waste and electrocardiogram readouts from the execution chamber, but some evidence — cut IV lines that traveled to the hospital with Pike — may not be in the Department of Correction’s custody.
Gov. Bill Lee has ordered a third-party investigation into what went wrong and halted executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year; Pike’s was the state’s second failed attempt this year. Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is stepping down later this month amid the backlash, and the death penalty has become a central argument in the governor’s race. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican nominee, has called for bringing back the electric chair to “deliver justice for these victims swiftly.” Her Democratic opponent, Jerri Green, has vowed to “enact a moratorium on all future executions” and said in a statement:
What happened on that gurney wasn’t just an administrative failure; it was torture, plain and simple
“The facts are clear: the death penalty has proven to be an ineffective deterrent to violent crime, it is vastly more expensive than life imprisonment, and it is riddled with bias,” her statement continued.
The machinery of execution turns out to be a bureaucracy like any other: logbooks, syringes measured to the millilitre, protocols with their numbered sections. But the protocol in Tennessee ends precisely where Christa Pike’s story begins — at the moment the state does everything its manual prescribes, twice, and the person on the gurney simply goes on breathing.