Tennessee did not execute its only woman on death row as scheduled Wednesday after injecting her with a lethal drug, a surprising development after the Supreme Court intervened to allow the state to sentence her to death. Christa Pike’s attorneys said Wednesday night that she was being treated at a hospital, but they did not know her condition. A Department of Corrections spokesperson did not respond to an emailed question about whether she was alive, but said she was “transported to an outside medical facility.” Pike, 50, is the only woman on death row in the state. She was convicted of the murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995, when she was 18, and sentenced to death. At a news conference Wednesday night, reporters who witnessed the botched execution described Pike’s snoring and complaints of pain, as well as his kicking so frequently that he caused the sheets covering him to fall off. Sometimes the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds. Christa Pike. Tennessee Department of Corrections via API In a federal court filing seeking to stop his execution, Pike’s lawyers said witnesses saw executioners injecting “both syringes of lethal chemicals” but that Pike was still alive. They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that the death chamber curtains “have been lowered twice,” according to the attorneys. In a telephone interview on NBC News early Thursday morning, May Martinez, the mother of victim Slemmer, described the failed execution attempt. “It was a disaster,” he said. Bill Lee, a Republican, said in a statement that he was ordering “a thorough third-party review to determine exactly what happened.” He added that the last remaining execution this year in Tennessee will not take place as planned. “Nothing that happened today was normal.” An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records. “It seemed like this didn’t go the way they thought it should,” said John North, an investigative producer for WBIR television in Knoxville. “But we don’t know. When we left the building, as far as we knew, she was probably still alive.” Tori Gessner, a reporter and anchor for WKRN in Nashville who has witnessed five executions in the state, said at a news conference that “nothing that happened today was normal, typical, at all.” Gessner said that at 7:34 p.m. Pike was heard saying, “I feel like my arm was about to burst.” Pike then talked about that spot on his arm and asked, “Does this happen like that?” Gessner said. A Department of Corrections spokesperson said the state “followed every step of the State’s legally established execution protocol, approved by the Attorney General’s Office” and that “chemical lethal injection in the protocol has been consistently effective.” Tony Carruthers, convicted of three murders in 1994, was granted a one-year reprieve after executioners in May failed to find a vein for a backup IV. “Tonight, the state of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” Pike’s attorneys said in a statement. The execution order against Pike was set to expire at midnight local time (1 a.m. ET Thursday). The Department of Corrections did not immediately say if or when they would attempt another execution. The process to execute Pike began around 8 p.m., his lawyers said, after the Supreme Court overturned a Wednesday morning order from a lower court that had temporarily blocked the move. The high court’s decision hours later capped a series of last-minute legal maneuvers in an attempt by Pike’s defense team to spare his life. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the Associated Press that what Pike experienced is “unique and incomparable.” The victim’s mother, furious. “They went to try to execute her and she didn’t die,” said Martinez, who wanted the execution to happen and was furious with the state governor, the director of the Department of Corrections and the attorney general. Christa Pike in court in 1996. Michael Patrick / USA Today via Reuters Martinez told NBC News that Pike never expressed remorse during Wednesday’s attempted execution. “Nothing…about what happened to Colleen,” Martinez said. She criticized the officials’ communications. “They didn’t say anything and then all of a sudden they asked all the victims to leave. And we left,” Martinez said. “We didn’t know anything until we got to the office and saw the commissioner,” Martinez said. “And he said it didn’t work… and she’s on her way to the hospital.” When asked what her message was to the governor and attorney general, Martinez was succinct in her response: “They’re screwed.” Pike was to be the first woman in more than 200 years the state has executed, according to historical records. Pike does not deny Slemmer’s brutal murder in which she and two teenage accomplices worked together to torture, stab and fatally beat 19-year-old Slemmer. The case became sensational when investigators said it was related to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike boasted to another student that he had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.” Colleen Slemmer.Picasa/May Martinez via APPBut current Pike supporters argue that the state should consider his age at the time, his mental illness, and his allegations of severe sexual abuse. “I was an 18-year-old girl with a mental illness. It took me many years to even realize the severity of what I had done,” Pike has said. At issue was whether Pike could reopen a court proceeding centered on her allegations that she had been sexually abused since she was a child, abuse that the state did not dispute in a special hearing in August. The appeals court, in a split decision, agreed to a “brief” stay to halt its execution “in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully informed arguments and resolve the substantive issues.” In turn, the state attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the execution needed to continue “avoiding rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics.” In their dissent, the three liberal justices wrote that overturning the lower court’s temporary stay of execution “interferes with the Sixth Circuit’s routine administrative handling of a capital case and unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.” “I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary appellate review process, particularly in light of the serious consequences of an erroneous decision,” Sotomayor wrote. Lee and the Supreme Court had said this week that they would not stop Pike’s execution. A letter Pike wrote before learning that Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency. via Rev. Mikey Noechel Before learning Monday that Lee would not intervene in his case, Pike wrote in a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual advisor: “Whether I am granted clemency or not, I am at peace.” “I am not afraid to die,” wrote Pike, who has been on death row the longest. of three decades. “The only thing that makes me nervous is the process.”
