Tennessee unable to carry out the execution by lethal injection of Christa Gail Pike

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure.

Pike was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said.

"We have not been informed as to her condition," Pike's attorneys said in a statement.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is "singular and unparalleled."

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to the execution team's failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

Pike's attorneys said: "We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy."

Related:

Tennessee is set to execute a woman for the first time in 200 years

Pike was convicted for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, amid satanic panic fears.

Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney.

Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.

By 8:26 p.m., execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.

Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53 p.m. At that time there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area.

Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson Dorinda Carter told media witnesses she was unable to immediately provide information about what happened.

Lawyers for Pike filed an emergency motion late Wednesday to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to immediately halt and stay the execution, saying she was in "unnecessary agony" and it was violating her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. They also filed motions in the Sixth Circuit court and district court.

The motion also asserted that the Department of Correction should begin lifesaving measures. "Failure to provide such care constitutes deliberate indifference to legitimate, serious medical needs."

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case garnered widespread attention in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer's body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.

It was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution: In May state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

Contributing: Jeffrey Collins, Ed White and Hallie Golden

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