A Tennessee woman, convicted of murder, has survived attempts to execute her by lethal injection. She was rushed to hospital, still breathing, after receiving two doses of pentobarbital.
Christa Pike was scheduled for execution yesterday and, after a late stay was overturned, would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee for more than 200 years. Now the 50-year-old’s botched capital punishment has drawn fresh attention to concerns about the fairness of her murder trial.
‘No precedent’
Early yesterday, Pike’s execution had been briefly paused by a federal appeals court on the grounds that more time was needed to consider her case. But, an hour before the midnight deadline for her execution was due to expire, the US Supreme Court overruled the stay, and prison officials went ahead with the process.
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Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1995 for a murder she committed at the age of 18, had asked to be executed by an all-female firing squad, saying that being held down by a group of men would traumatise her. But execution by firing squad is not allowed in Tennessee, so lethal injection was used instead.
After the required syringe of pentobarbital was administered, Pike was given a second dose. Members of the media, who were at the execution as witnesses, described her as “somewhat alert”. They told The New York Times that, at one point, she could be heard singing with her spiritual adviser. Her legal team say she still had a heartbeat after being given the second dose, and had not lost consciousness.
As it became clear that the lethal injection had not worked, the execution was halted and Pike was transferred to hospital. She was apparently snoring loudly as she was taken to the ambulance. Her current condition is unknown, and it remains unclear what her fate will be if she recovers. State governor Bill Lee has suspended all further executions in Tennessee this year, pending an investigation into the incident.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.” The Tennessee Department of Correction insisted that it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office”.
‘Uniquely compelling’
At her trial in 1995, Pike had confessed to the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Sleemer, “a young woman she viewed as a romantic rival” when they met at a vocational camp for troubled teens, said Al Jazeera. With her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend, Pike lured Slemmer into the woods, where they taunted her, beat her with asphalt rocks and slashed her with a knife.
Pike, who was described by the Daily Mail as a “Satanist killer”, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull after the killing. Shipp said he had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest. Both were convicted of first-degree murder. Shipp, who was 17, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; Pike, who, at 18, qualified for capital punishment, was sentenced to death.
Since her sentencing, her legal team have uncovered details about her childhood that they say the jury never had the chance to consider. She has a “documented history of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment and neglect”, said the BBC. She was physically and sexually abused by several of her mother’s husbands and boyfriends, and described being raped twice, at the age of 11 and 17. Her legal team also presented evidence that her mother drank heavily during pregnancy, impairing Pike’s brain development and her impulse control.
“It is mind-boggling” that her history of abuse and rape was not revealed to the jury, Sandra Babcock, an expert in gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School, told the BBC. Her case is “uniquely compelling, not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness”.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said at the weekend that she had waited decades to see Pike’s death sentence carried out. A victim’s rights group had raised funds for her and her husband to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died,” she said. “I just want Christa down so I can end it.”
