Kim Chandler and James Stengle
Warning: Graphic content
Convicted killer Christa Pike was placed on a ventilator and unconscious in a hospital in the hours after her failed execution in Tennessee, her lawyers said in a court filing on Friday (US time).
Hospital staff, her lawyers said, were working to save Pike’s life and clear two doses of the drug that the states uses to execute prisoners.
The stunning failure in Tennessee’s execution chamber on Wednesday has left both sides on the death penalty debate demanding answers. The state’s governor has ordered an independent review.
In the court filing, Pike’s attorneys said they believed problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realise 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,” they wrote.
Instead of “remedying this failure”, they prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringe, her lawyers said.
Pike, 50, who was convicted of murdering her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, in 1995, would have been the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.
State officials have not offered any explanation about what went wrong during the execution attempt.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee demanded a review of the state’s execution procedures and indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and another one slated for this year. Other Republican political leaders in Tennessee said the state should review whether to stop single-drug lethal injections and consider other options to carry out death sentences.
The execution team worked for an hour to administer the lethal drugs, said Pike’s defence lawyer Randy Spivey, who counted at least seven needles in her left arm.
Neither the initial nor the backup dose of pentobarbital worked. Pike was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the attempt.
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