Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for the remainder of the year after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections on Wednesday. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Prior to the scheduled execution, Pike and her lawyers argued a single-dose lethal injection could be tantamount to torture due to Pike’s small veins. Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed when she was 18. Now in the hospital in critical condition, she is the first person to ever survive lethal injection in the United States.
“I have seen five executions in Tennessee,” says Steven Hale, a criminal justice reporter for the Nashville Banner, who witnessed Christa Pike’s botched execution. “And I’ve never seen anything like what we saw Wednesday night.”
Christa Pike “has just experienced the most agonizing attempt at lethal injection in the country’s history,” says Sandra Babcock, director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Babcock says Pike should have never been sentenced to death, because she was an “immature 18-year-old” with a history of severe childhood and sexual trauma who “was not receiving medication for post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder at the time of [the murder], which she committed with her abusive boyfriend at the time.”
