Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.

Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for the remainder of the year after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections on Wednesday. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Prior to the scheduled execution, Pike and her lawyers argued a single-dose lethal injection could be tantamount to torture due to Pike’s small veins. Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed when she was 18. Now in the hospital in critical condition, she is the first person to ever survive lethal injection in the United States.

“I have seen five executions in Tennessee,” says Steven Hale, a criminal justice reporter for the Nashville Banner, who witnessed Christa Pike’s botched execution. “And I’ve never seen anything like what we saw Wednesday night.”

Christa Pike “has just experienced the most agonizing attempt at lethal injection in the country’s history,” says Sandra Babcock, director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Babcock says Pike should have never been sentenced to death, because she was an “immature 18-year-old” with a history of severe childhood and sexual trauma who “was not receiving medication for post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder at the time of [the murder], which she committed with her abusive boyfriend at the time.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Tennessee Attempted to Execute a Sexual Assault Victim

Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted all remaining executions this year after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections Wednesday night. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Witnesses say Pike described a burning spot in her arm that felt like it was going to burst. She smiled and laughed, then gasped repeatedly and began snoring, but continued to breathe. She was later taken to the hospital.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent review of the botched execution, but Christa Pike’s attorneys say he should go further and commute her sentence. On Thursday, Christa Pike’s attorney, Randy Spivey, addressed reporters during a news conference.

RANDY SPIVEY: Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving lifesaving medical care. The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. Last night was not just inefficient; it was cruel, and it was torturous. It was also predictable. Christa’s legal team told the state of Tennessee and the court that her medical conditions would cause her to suffer an agonizing death. The state and the court dismiss Christa’s concerns. The governor’s call for an independent review does not go far enough. After having endured solitary confinement for more than 20 years and a full attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.

RANDY SPIVEY: Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving lifesaving medical care.

The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity. Last night was not just inefficient; it was cruel, and it was torturous. It was also predictable. Christa’s legal team told the state of Tennessee and the court that her medical conditions would cause her to suffer an agonizing death. The state and the court dismiss Christa’s concerns.

The governor’s call for an independent review does not go far enough. After having endured solitary confinement for more than 20 years and a full attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.

AMY GOODMAN: Christa Pike’s lawyers revealed the execution team went through at least seven needles trying to find a vein, including one that appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her arm. Medical experts say the blistering and burning around the IV insertion sites suggest the pentobarbital may have leaked into the surrounding tissue rather than entering Pike’s bloodstream, potentially causing chemical burns. Some experts have raised the possibility the pentobarbital may have degraded or expired, which could have made it less effective.

Christa Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed when she was 18 years old. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Wednesday night’s attempted execution went forward only after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay by an appeals court, which had paused her execution to consider whether her sentencing had fully weighed mitigating evidence, including severe childhood trauma and neglect, including rape and sexual abuse and mental illness.

Weeks before her........

© Truthout