The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.
They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”
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.
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.
Attorneys for Pike said Wednesday night that Pike was being treated at a hospital but they did not know her condition. The state Department of Correction did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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.
“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.
The office of Gov. Bill Lee and the state attorney general did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.
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 if 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.
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 Colleen 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.
In her letter, Pike wrote that people have seen a “limited public persona that has been the only narrative” about her. Her lawyers had tried to convince Lee that she was a product of a tumultuous childhood.
“Stepping into the chaos of Christa’s life that led her to that moment will not justify her actions that night,” one of her lawyers, Randall Spivey, said of the time when she committed her crime. “But the chaos will show you that Christa was broken, not evil.”
Different sentences
Pike’s lawyers also pointed to her age and how it led to such a different outcome in her case.
While she faced a death sentence because of her first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder conviction in Slemmer’s death, another conspirator was spared: Pike’s boyfriend, who was 17 at the time.
Tadaryl Shipp was sentenced to life in prison because he was a juvenile and remains eligible for parole. Shipp testified at his post-conviction hearing that he was the one who carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
The third accomplice — Shadolla Peterson, then 18 — served as a lookout in the crime and was sentenced to probation in exchange for her cooperation.
Pike told police that she “wasn’t even thinking” when she assaulted Slemmer and that she had been jealous, believing the victim was trying to steal Shipp’s attention. Pike’s lawyers said her age would have been more of a factor today, given how scientific research has evolved in understanding that young people’s brains are still developing well beyond their teen years.
In addition, her lawyers said her legal representatives at the time could have accepted a deal from prosecutors who were offering a life sentence without parole in return for a guilty plea.
Pike sobbed as the judge told her she would die by electrocution, then the only form of execution in Tennessee before the state moved to lethal injection as its primary method.
She pleaded through tears: “Can I please hug my mom?”
Pike entered prison, where she was placed into solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day and prescribed Prozac to treat her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Early on, she struggled to express remorse.
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in her clemency petition.
Lingering trauma
Three years ago, Pike’s lawyers asked Bethany Brand, a psychologist specializing in trauma, to assess whether she suffers from psychological disorders and consider whether any contributed to the crime.
She sat with Pike at her Nashville prison and reviewed police reports, past medical examinations and other files in her case detailing physical and sexual abuse.
Brand learned that Pike’s parents were not stable figures in her life. Her mother’s boyfriends and other men had molested her from a young age, the files said. She did poorly in school, living with other family members in West Virginia and North Carolina. At 17 — one year before she would take part in Slemmer’s murder — Pike reported to North Carolina police that she was walking to the store when a man threw her to the ground and raped her. No one was ever arrested.
In her final report, Brand wrote that the adults in Pike’s life failed her. Doctors only diagnosed a bipolar disorder a few years after she was already in prison.
The level of trauma Pike was subjected to “is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” Brand wrote.
She told NBC News that medications in prison have helped Pike tremendously and that she now has “empathy and great regret” for what she did. Pike’s case, she added, is a lesson in the need for greater awareness surrounding women’s mental health and recognizing trauma and untreated mental illness.
“In Christa’s case, nobody was trying to get her help,” Brand said.
May Martinez is unconvinced that the person responsible for mutilating her daughter’s body and leaving her nude from the waist up could change.
Martinez recalled that, after the investigation ended, she did not realize all of her daughter’s body parts were not buried with her remains, as some had been retained as trial evidence. She had to pick up Slemmer’s skull from the courthouse, and she remembers that the medical examiner’s office mailed her other parts later. (The office said it rarely retains human remains as it did 30 years ago because of better technology, enhanced photography and lab work.)
“We had her buried in a Catholic cemetery,” Martinez said. “And she had to be dug up every time they mailed me body parts.”
Recently, she said, she has refused to communicate with Pike directly. The only way she can get justice now is when she watches Pike be executed.
“I will sit there with her picture in my hand,” Martinez said of her daughter, “and as she gets hooked up to a needle to go to sleep, she can look at the picture.”
All-female execution team
Given the rarity of the execution of a female prisoner, Tennessee corrections officials said they would make an effort to fulfill certain requests made by Pike. They included using female guards when she was moved from her all-women’s prison in Nashville to the nearby Riverbend Maximum Security Institution within 24 hours of her planned execution. An all-female execution team may also be assigned.
At least one exception was expected to be a male physician who was involved in Carruthers’ failed execution earlier this year. Dr. Mark Walton Fowler told NBC News that he intended to participate in Pike’s execution. Fowler declined to comment after Pike’s failed execution Wednesday night.
Pike’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Mikey Noechel, a Buddhist teacher, says he will also be permitted in the execution chamber. He plans to bless the space, chant and meditate, focusing on a Buddhist prayer of “loving-kindness” with Pike.
Noechel, who has not previously been a spiritual adviser to someone on death row, said they have spent time speaking openly about life, death and gratitude. Pike, he added, does not shy away from what she did.
“She did something terrible. Awful. I hate that it happened, and I feel deep compassion for Colleen Slemmer’s family,” Noechel said. “But Christa is proof that redemption and change are possible.”
He believes all Pike wanted was to be loved and for someone, especially those she trusted, to notice her.
In the letter shared by Noechel, Pike wrote that she is thankful for the support and has felt “more love in the last two weeks than I have my entire life.”
“I am humbled beyond words,” she wrote, scribbling a heart at the bottom of the note.