Tennessee fails to execute woman on death row after lethal injection

Tennessee failed to execute a woman on its death row as planned Wednesday, after injecting her with a lethal drug, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.

Attorneys for Christa Pike said Wednesday night that she was being treated at a hospital, but they did not know her condition. A spokesperson for the Department of Correction did not answer an emailed question whether she was alive but said she was “transported to an off-site medical facility.”

Pike, 50, is the state’s only woman on death row. She was convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995, when she was 18 years old, and sentenced to death.

In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.

In a federal court filing seeking to halt her execution, Pike’s lawyers said witnesses saw executioners injecting “both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” but that Pike remained alive.

They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice,” according to the lawyers.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said in a statement that he was ordering “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” He added that the last remaining execution for this year will not be carried out as planned.

In a phone interview with NBC News early Thursday morning, May Martinez, the mother of victim Colleen Slemmer, described the execution attempt.

“It was a mess,” she said.

‘Nothing about today was normal’

An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.

“It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go,” said John North, investigative producer at WBIR television in Knoxville. “But we don’t know that. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.”

Tori Gessner, a reporter and anchor at WKRN of Nashville who has witnessed five executions in the state, said at a news conference that, “Nothing about today was normal, typical, at all.”

Gessner said that at 7:34 p.m. Pike was heard saying, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.” Pike then talked about that spot on her arm and asked, “Does this happen like that?” Gessner said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Correction said the state “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office” and that “the lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective.”

It’s the second time an execution did not go as planned in Tennessee this year. Tony Carruthers, convicted in three 1994 killings, was granted a one-year reprieve after executioners in May couldn’t find a vein for a backup IV.

“Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” Pike’s attorneys said in a statement.

The execution warrant for Pike was set to expire at midnight local time (1 a.m. ET Thursday). The Department of Correction did not immediately say whether they would attempt another execution, or when.

The process to execute Pike began at about 8 p.m., her lawyers said, after the Supreme Court vacated a lower court’s Wednesday morning order that had temporarily blocked the move.

The high court’s decision hours later capped a flurry of last-minute legal maneuvering in a bid by Pike’s defense team to spare her life. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Victim’s mother furious

“They went to try to execute her, and she didn’t die,” said Martinez, who wanted the execution carried out and was furious with the state’s governor, the director of the Department of Correction and the attorney general.

Martinez said Pike never expressed remorse during Wednesday’s attempted execution. “Not nothing. That sorry about what happened, you know, to Colleen,” Martinez said.

She criticized the communication about what was going in from officials.

“They didn’t say anything, and then, all of a sudden, they asked all the victims to leave. And we left,” Martinez said.

“We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner,” Martinez said. “And he said that it didn’t work, that it didn’t work, and she’s on her way to the hospital.”

Asked what her message to the governor and attorney general was, Martinez was terse in her response: “They f—– up.”

Appeals court stayed execution, based on child abuse claims

About an hour before her scheduled execution at 10 a.m. local time in Nashville, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it needed to review claims made by her lawyers. At issue was whether Pike could reopen a court proceeding centered around her allegations that she was sexually abused beginning when she was a child — abuse that the state did not dispute at a special hearing in August.

The appeals court in a split decision agreed to a “short” reprieve halting her execution “in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits.”

In turn, the state attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the execution needed to go on to “avoid rewarding Pike’s abusive delay tactics.”

In their dissent, the three liberal justices wrote that vacating the lower court’s temporary stay of execution “interferes with the Sixth Circuit’s routine administrative handling of a capital case and unnecessarily prevents that court from giving due consideration to Pike’s claim.”

“I see no reason to shortcircuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision,” Sotomayor wrote.

Lee and the Supreme Court had said this week they would not stop Pike’s execution.

Before she learned Monday that Lee would not intervene in her case, Pike wrote in a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual adviser: “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace.”

“I am not afraid to die,” wrote Pike, who has been on death row for more than three decades. “I’m only nervous about the process.”

Pike was set to be the first woman in more than 200 years that the state has put to death, according to historical records.

In 1995, Knoxville police said, she and two teenage accomplices worked together to torture, slash and fatally beat Slemmer, 19. Police said Pike and the others lured Slemmer, a classmate in their Job Corps training program, to an abandoned steam plant at the nearby University of Tennessee and attacked her.

The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”

Pike does not dispute her role in the grisly killing. But details about her upbringing, marked by years of sexual and physical abuse and neglect, were not shared with the jury that sentenced her to death. Her lawyers believe that if such evidence of abuse were presented at a trial now, a death sentence would not be guaranteed.

They had asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, was likely to create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”

The state has not denied that Pike has suffered from abuse. But in a response filed Monday, the attorney general’s office said a judge already concluded last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from how the lethal injection protocol is carried out.

The Supreme Court appeared to be Pike’s remaining chance for a reprieve after Lee said he was upholding her death sentence “after deliberate consideration.” The high court denied her petition Tuesday evening.

Pike’s lawyers said Monday they were “saddened and heartbroken” that the governor would not be granting clemency.

Another woman, Gaile Owens, was on Tennessee’s death row with Pike until 2010, when Gov. Phil Bredesen changed her sentence to life in prison. (NBC News)

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