Christa Pike critically ill after surviving two execution attempts in Tennessee

Nashville, United States. Christa Pike was critically ill and receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital on Thursday after surviving two attempts by Tennessee to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers said. The failed execution has renewed scrutiny of capital punishment in the United States.

Execution halted and sentence review sought

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder she committed as a teenager. The failed execution took place on Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year.

“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers who witnessed the execution attempt, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now.”

Her lawyers renewed calls for her sentence to be commuted to life in prison after she endured what they described as “chemical torture.” Tennessee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while it investigates the incident.

Unusual failure after drugs were injected

Botched lethal injections are not rare, but they usually involve difficulties in the initial step of placing intravenous lines in the prisoner’s body. In Pike’s case, prison officials appeared to have injected the drugs using two syringes, causing her right arm to “turn purple” and her skin to blister at the injection sites, Spivey said.

According to the Death Penalty Information Centre, a non-profit group in Washington, Pike appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her body.

“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” the centre’s director, Robin Maher, said in a statement.

After the second injection, Pike said her arm hurt and felt as though it was “about to explode,” her lawyers said. They said this suggested the drugs had entered her arm tissue rather than going directly into her bloodstream.

Concerns over lethal injection

Pike would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries. Her lawyers said she has a blood condition and had feared something would go wrong with lethal injection.

They unsuccessfully petitioned the state to consider alternative execution methods, including hanging or a firing squad.

The failed execution highlights the difficulties US states face in administering lethal injections and finding suitable alternative methods of capital punishment.