Witnesses to Christa Pike’s failed execution said the convicted killer lifted her head after a second dose of lethal drugs and asked whether the pain she was experiencing was normal.
Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, survived two rounds of the powerful sedative pentobarbital on Wednesday. Reporters said they had never witnessed anything like the botched execution.
“They went through two rounds, and she was still breathing at the end. It was very ragged. She lifted her head up and was looking around at one point,” Catherine Sweeney of WPLN said during a briefing after the execution was halted. “She said there was a spot that was burning and hurting and asked if that was normal.”
“None of that was normal,” Sweeney added.
Pike, 50, was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution shortly before 7:30 p.m. CDT, about an hour after the US Supreme Court overturned her stay of execution.
“When they told us to leave at 8:53, Christa Pike was still breathing. They did two separate rounds of pentobarbital, which I’ve never seen before,” Sweeney recalled. “The protocol does say they should administer a second round if the person is still alive.”
“I covered all of the executions last year and most of the ones this year. We haven’t seen anything like it,” she said.
Tennessee’s execution protocol instructs officials to administer a second set of syringes “if the inmate is not deceased” after the initial injection. It does not explain what should happen if the person remains alive after that second round.
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Death penalty opponents condemned the Tennessee Department of Corrections’ use of lethal injection following the failed execution.
“The state of Tennessee has shown the world it cannot be trusted to implement capital punishment in a way that preserves human dignity and the rule of law. This has to stop now,” Laura Porter, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, said in a statement to USA Today.
Other witnesses at the Nashville prison said Pike complained of a “throbbing” sensation in her arm as officials attempted to carry out the execution.
“My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” WKRN reporter Tori Gessner recalled Pike saying.
Pike was later taken to a nearby hospital, where her attorneys said she was “being provided life-saving measures.”
Her condition remained unclear as of Thursday morning. However, a doctor retained by Pike’s legal team as a medical expert said she likely suffered a brain injury.
“It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay in beginning resuscitation, she will have a brain injury,” Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told the BBC.
Pike had been on death row for a 1995 murder in which prosecutors said she lured a romantic rival into a wooded area, tortured her with a box cutter and carved a pentagram into her chest before striking her head with a piece of asphalt. Pike was also accused of taking a fragment of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.
