Execution halted mid-procedure

On September thirtieth, Christa Pike was scheduled for execution at Riverbend prison in Nashville. An appeals court granted a stay hours before, but the Supreme Court vacated it by late afternoon. Pike received lethal injections but remained conscious and breathing after an hour.

Pike's last words and the injection

Pike offered love to those who loved her and those who hated her as her final words. A doctor administered pentobarbital through her left arm. Pike remained conscious and asked whether it was normal that her arm felt like it might burst.

The execution descended into chaos

A second syringe was administered. Pike appeared to lose consciousness but was observed snoring, indicating she was still breathing. After an hour, lawyers made emergency calls and the execution was halted. A media witness said of the scene, none of it was normal.

“None of it was normal.”

Pike transported to hospital

Pike was placed in an ambulance around nine PM Central Daylight Time, which would take her alive or dead to either a hospital or a morgue. The proceedings had tipped into what one observer called a scene of government depravity, violating the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Pike's crime and sentence

Christa Pike was eighteen years old when she murdered her classmate Colleen Slemmer in nineteen ninety-five. A year later, Pike became the youngest woman to receive a death sentence in the modern era. She is now fifty years old.

The accomplice received a lighter sentence

Pike's boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp was an accomplice in Colleen Slemmer's killing and was convicted of murder. Because Pike was eighteen at the time of the killing, she received a death sentence. Shipp, who was seventeen, received a life sentence instead.

History of capital punishment in America

The Founding Fathers were uneasy about state killing. Thomas Jefferson proposed reducing Virginia's capital crimes from thirty-nine to two: treason and murder. The proposal failed by a single vote. Early America developed the prison as a reform to lethal punishment.

The modernization of execution

The state sought to progress past the rope and the tree, introducing instead a chemical cocktail and a needle, introducing protocol, making the whole thing look medicalized and humane. Mark Fowler, the physician who supervised Pike's lethal injections, has been known to use the word patient in reference to the condemned.

Previous failed execution in Tennessee

In May, a team supervised by Fowler tried and failed to insert an intravenous line into Tony Carruthers's body for more than an hour, attempting his arms, shoulders, jugular, and chest. The execution was abandoned and Carruthers was subsequently granted a reprieve for one year.

States turn to alternative execution methods

Failed lethal injections account for the majority of botched executions since nineteen eighty-two. Drug shortages have led to the revival of older methods like the firing squad and the introduction of new ones. Alabama decided to start killing people by nitrogen gas asphyxiation.

Nitrogen gas execution ruled unconstitutional

Kenneth Eugene Smith became the first person in the country to die by nitrogen gas in January of twenty twenty-four. Eight men were killed via gassing until an Alabama district judge ruled the execution method unconstitutionally cruel in June. The Supreme Court has maintained the block.

Public support for death penalty contradicts belief

According to a Pew Research Center poll in August, sixty-six percent of Americans support the death penalty in the case of murder. Yet fifty-nine percent believe capital punishment is not a crime deterrent. Support for capital punishment has hovered at around half the population in the past twenty-five years.

Pike's mitigating circumstances

Pike's legal team has petitioned courts to consider mitigating realities of her childhood, marked by sexual abuse and neglect, and the failure of the state to protect her. Most of her years on death row have been spent in solitary confinement.

Governor orders review, Pike in critical condition

Governor Bill Lee has halted all executions scheduled in Tennessee for this calendar year and commissioned an independent review of Pike's attempted execution. Pike is said to be in critical condition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, though her lawyers have not been granted access to her bedside.