Nocturnal 
Christa Pike was meant to die at 7.27pm on Wednesday. Instead, two full doses of the drug pentobarbital left her conscious, gasping and asking prison officials if what she was feeling was “normal”, according to witnesses in the room.
The 50-year-old was due to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead she’s now in an undisclosed hospital, and the state has halted every scheduled execution for a year while officials try to work out what went wrong.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer the previous year, a killing so brutal that a groundskeeper who found the body reportedly didn’t initially recognise it as human. She was 18 at the time and became one of the youngest people ever sent to death row in the US.
What happened in the execution chamber
According to The Mirror, curtains in the viewing area at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville were raised at 7.27pm, showing Pike strapped to a gurney. Her last words reportedly described her as “at peace”, saying: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love.”
The curtains closed at 7.46pm and reopened three minutes later. Witnesses said Pike was gasping, moaning and kicking her bedsheet. “Her mouth fell open a few times, and she began to loudly snore. She gasped a few times,” one witness said, as reported by The Mirror.
Journalists present said Pike was heard describing a burning sensation in her arm that felt “about to burst”, and at one point raised her head to ask if that was normal. A second dose of pentobarbital was then administered, but Pike reportedly remained alive, with a heartbeat and audible snoring, some 40 minutes after the drugs were first given, as reported by Sick Chirpse.
She was transferred by ambulance to hospital for emergency treatment, according to her legal team, who said she was being given “life-saving measures”.
Why the drug is supposed to work differently
Pentobarbital, sold commercially as Nembutal, is a central nervous system depressant used in low doses as a sedative, an anti-seizure treatment, and by vets to euthanise animals. In large execution doses, it’s designed to cross the blood-brain barrier within seconds, causing rapid unconsciousness followed by respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, according to The Sun.
That’s not what happened here. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the New York Times, as reported by Yahoo, that the botched execution was “the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era”, adding “there is no precedent.”
Pike’s lawyers had raised concerns before the execution about “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”, according to a statement reported by Yahoo.
Where things stand now
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has paused all executions in the state for a year and ordered a review. It’s the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, after a May attempt failed when staff couldn’t find a usable vein, resulting in a reprieve for another inmate.
The US Supreme Court had cleared the way for Pike’s execution to go ahead hours earlier, overturning a lower court’s last-minute stay. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor warning it allowed the execution to proceed “before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered.”
Pike’s condition remains unconfirmed, and the hospital treating her is reportedly unknown even to her own attorneys. Her case is now one of only a handful in US history where someone has survived a lethal injection attempt.
