Christa Pike unconscious, on ventilator after failed execution, court hears

Christa Pike, a Tennessee death row inmate who survived two doses of lethal injection in a botched execution earlier this week, is intubated on a ventilator and unconscious, her lawyers said in a court filing Friday.

Hospital staff, her lawyers said, were working to save Pike’s life and clear the two doses of pentobarbital, which Tennessee uses in its executions, from her system, the court filing shared by the New York Times states.

In the document, Pike’s lawyers said they believed faulty IV lines caused the drug to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.

“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” they wrote.

Instead of “remedying this failure,” they prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes, her lawyers said, noting that at least seven needles were placed in her left arm and that she arrived in hospital with swelling and blisters on both arms.

At one point she even offered guidance to the medical team as to where they might access a vein.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered an independent review of the failure and suspended a lone state execution scheduled for later this year.

Other Republican political leaders in Tennessee said the state should review whether to stop single-drug lethal injections and consider other options to carry out death sentences.

State officials have not offered any explanation about what went wrong during the execution attempt.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that it “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,’ the AP added.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is “singular and unparalleled.”

According to the filing, Pike warned the courts nine months ago that the lethal injection may result in cruel and unusual punishment due to existing health conditions, including thrombocytosis, small veins and post-traumatic stress, and expressed that these characteristics would make it “significantly more difficult” to maintain IV access.