Execution aborted in Tennessee: She survived two lethal injections

dpa | Judicial tug-of-war and enforcement complications have accompanied the first execution of a woman in more than 200 years in the US state of Tennessee. According to her defense attorneys, Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, was still alive after receiving two lethal injections.

“At 8:26 p.m., witnesses to the execution reported that the executioners had injected both syringes with the lethal chemicals and that Pike was still alive and snoring,” a court document said. According to Judge Kyle Hixson, the state did not initially declare the 50-year-old dead. The correctional authority ordered emergency medical treatment and her transport to a hospital, Hixson told the lawyers of all those involved in a telephone conference.

Pike was the only woman currently serving a sentence on death row in the southeastern US state, according to the Tennessee government's official website. She is also the first woman to be executed in Tennessee since 1819, according to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

The enforcement on Wednesday evening (local time) was preceded by a legal tug of war. Initially, the execution by lethal injection was stopped shortly before it was carried out. Then the Supreme Court, the highest US court, granted an emergency application from the state authority responsible for prisons, thus overriding the enforcement freeze imposed by a lower court.

The three liberal justices on the Supreme Court criticized the court's majority decision. In her dissenting opinion, Sonia Sotomayor argued that the decision paves the way for the state to execute Pike before questions about the legality of the previous procedure can be properly examined. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed.

Sotomayor further wrote that she sees no reason to bypass the usual route of this review, "particularly given the serious consequences of an erroneous decision." She described the procedure as “extraordinary”.

Christa Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of a then 19-year-old acquaintance. Pike was 18 years old at the time of the crime. In 1995, three teenagers tortured and killed the victim in a remote area near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

An appeals court ruled on Wednesday that Pike, who was sentenced to death, had raised doubts about the legality of the previous proceedings, which now had to be examined. The central point was the judicial assessment of trauma that Pike said he suffered as a child.

The convicted woman claimed in court that the state of Tennessee had dismissed her as a liar and considered her statements about the abuse she suffered to be fabricated. However, the state later recognized the abuse as such.

In its urgent application to the US Supreme Court, the state of Tennessee accused Pike's defense of, among other things, deliberate delay tactics at the last minute in order to prevent enforcement. In addition, the plaintiffs saw little chance of success for the convicted woman: the cruelty and seriousness of the murder were so legally serious that even the childhood trauma that was alleged in court would not have prevented the death penalty.

Pike, however, argued in a response to the Supreme Court that the state would not suffer irreparable harm if the emergency motion was rejected. However, if he were to be granted, Pike would lose her life.