Christa Pike Survives Botched Tennessee Execution, Prompting Statewide Pause and Review
By Steve Gorman
Sept. 30 (Reuters) — Christa Pike, convicted in the 1995 torture and beating death of a Knoxville schoolmate, survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection late Wednesday, prison officials said, foiling what would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in more than two centuries.
Pike’s condition after the failed procedure was not immediately known. It also was not clear what legal options her attorneys or the state might pursue next. She was taken from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for medical treatment, officials said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction defended its handling of the execution, which Pike’s lawyers and human rights experts had opposed, citing her age at the time of the crime, her history as a childhood sexual abuse victim and untreated mental illness.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,” the agency said in a statement.
It added that the lethal injection chemical “has consistently been effective” and that the protocol did not permit additional procedures beyond those carried out Wednesday evening. “Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility,” the statement said.
During the procedure, Pike’s lawyers filed a federal court motion seeking to halt the execution, NBC News reported, citing witness accounts that executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals and that Pike was still alive and snoring.
Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike’s clemency petition on Monday, issued a statement after the failed execution, suspending all executions this year and calling for a “comprehensive, third-party review,” according to the Nashville Tennessean.
The failed attempt was Tennessee’s second this year. In May, prison officials aborted an attempt to execute a man convicted of murders after they could not find a suitable vein for his lethal injection.
Wednesday’s procedure came hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an 11th-hour lower-court stay, clearing the way for Pike, 50, to be put to death for her role in the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a third companion lured Slemmer—a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center—into a wooded area, where they tortured and killed her.
The grisly nature of the slaying drew intense media coverage at the time. The perpetrators carved the shape of a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and took a piece of her skull as a souvenir, according to the account in the case. Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spoken out in support of the execution.
Ambulance Called
Journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring, loud exhales, gasps and complaints from Pike about discomfort in her arm. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Clergy were called into the chamber twice, the witnesses said, before an ambulance was seen arriving at the prison and then leaving.
Beyond being the first woman Tennessee had tried to execute in more than 200 years, Pike was also poised to become the only person in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment to be executed in the state for a crime committed as a teenager.
In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute Pike’s death penalty to life in prison without the possibility of parole, her lawyers earlier this week documented her history as a childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17. They also cited prison diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her lawyers further pointed to evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for Pike to control her impulses as a young person.
Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the Correction Department.
Executions of female inmates are exceedingly rare in the United States. Women account for just 18 of the 1,683 people put to death since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Before Wednesday, Tennessee had executed 17 people.
The failed execution is likely to intensify scrutiny of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol and of how states carry out capital punishment when defendants are young, mentally ill or victims of severe childhood trauma. It also injects new uncertainty into a death penalty system already facing renewed legal and political challenges across the country.
Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Bill Berkrot and Neil Fullick