Tennessee death row inmate Christa Gail Pike is in critical condition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after a cruel and gruesome failed attempt by state officials to execute her Sept. 30 at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institute in Nashville. Pike was the first woman the state had attempted to execute in more than 200 years, and the only woman on death row.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
The crime a then 18-year-old Pike was convicted of was horrific. She and her boyfriend tortured and cold-bloodedly murdered Colleen Slemmer, a young woman Pike thought was trying to steal her boyfriend.
Pike had lived through a brutish childhood, including being raped twice, at ages 11 and 17.
Pike was the first person to ever survive after being injected with lethal drugs. Seven others have escaped state attempts to kill them when executioners were unable to establish IV lines.
Sixty opponents of the death penalty protested outside the prison, including Amanda Buck, a former prisoner who had become Pike’s friend. She’d asked to stay longer in solitary confinement to be near her.
Pike was told she would be executed at 10 a.m., but an hour before a split three-judge panel at the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay to review whether her brutal childhood had been taken into account at her trial. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted 6-3 to vacate the stay.
In a procedure that was supposed to last 10 minutes, the “special operations team” tried repeatedly to establish an IV line to inject the lethal drug pentobarbital. This went on for an hour. At one point they shut the curtain so those attending the execution could no longer see what was going on. When they reopened it, Randy Spivey, one of Pike’s attorneys, counted seven needles in her left arm alone.
Small veins, blood disorder
Pike has small veins and a blood disorder that her lawyers told state officials could cause blood clotting at the injection site, or bleeding affecting the lungs. Because she knew the pain and other serious problems she would likely face with lethal injection, Pike had asked a state court that she be hung instead. This appeal was denied.
With her spiritual adviser, Rev. Mikey Noechel, in the room, at 7:30 p.m. Pike spoke what she thought would be her last words. “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is with love,” she said. “I’m ready to be free. This is a happy day.”
Witnesses next to the execution chamber heard her try to help the executioners find a vein. “Over and over again she said, ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher, please try here,” said Spivey.
Four minutes later Pike was in obvious pain. “The vein in my arm feels like it’s about to bust,” she said. Pike asked Noechel, “Does it happen like that?” He replied, “Relax.” “I’m trying,” said Pike. A TV reporter from Knoxville, Will Puckett, told media, “I saw a tear roll down her right eye, and then she said, ‘One spot is really throbbing.’”
As time went on, witnesses could hear Pike choking, and then snoring. Then prison authorities ordered a second injection. “The attorneys said that the execution team never realized that the intravenous lines were not properly placed,” the Washington Post wrote Oct. 2.
The prison doctor handling the injections, Mark Walton Fowler, was the same one who had botched the execution of Tony Carruthers months earlier.
Prison authorities had no emergency medical personnel or vehicle in place during the execution. Witnesses are not allowed to have cellphones, so Pike’s legal team on the outside scrambled to reach authorities to stop the execution, saying she was in “unnecessary agony,” and the procedure violated her right to be executed free of cruel and unusual punishment. Neither the governor’s office nor the State Supreme Court answered. The attorneys were finally told the state attorney general’s office had just called for an ambulance.
When Pike arrived at the hospital, both of her arms were swollen, burned and blistered. “We at this point do not know the ramifications of the chemical torture that she has endured,” said Spivey.
In a 2006 interview, journalist Helen Roberts said Pike told her she’d “lost her mind” when she killed Slemmer and was deeply sorry for what she did.
After the botched execution, Gov. William Lee paused the Dec. 3 execution of Gary Wayne Sutton. On Oct. 3 Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada resigned.