Lawyers for Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike say she was still alive Wednesday night (Sept. 30) after being given two syringes of lethal injection drugs. The Hill reports that her federal public defenders made the claim in a motion to the Tennessee Supreme Court, citing witnesses. They say the pentobarbital doses were given at 8:26 p.m. local time.
The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the execution about two hours earlier. It voted 6-3 to lift a stay issued that morning by a federal appeals court. Pike, 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and murdered 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She does not deny the killing. If carried out, hers would be the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Developing, unverified: the claim that Pike survived the doses comes from her lawyers. So does the New York Post's report that a lawyer described her as “snoring” after two injections. The AP, as cited by SCOTUSblog, reported that Tennessee officials were unable to put Pike to death, citing media witnesses. The packet contains no statement from the state on what happened in the chamber.
The New York Post, citing The Tennessean, reported that Pike was strapped to a gurney in the Nashville death chamber just before 7:30 p.m. CDT. While the procedure appeared to still be underway, her lawyers asked the Supreme Court to “immediately halt and stay the execution.” They said she was in “unnecessary agony” and that the process violated her right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, per SCOTUSblog's summary of the AP report.
The path to the chamber ran through a single day of filings. On Tuesday (Sept. 29), Pike asked a federal court to reopen her post-conviction case. She cited the state's recent concession that she “was a teenaged survivor of child sexual abuse and rape who was struggling with unmedicated bipolar disorder and PTSD at the time of her crime,” according to SCOTUSblog. Her team argues that the jury never weighed those facts at sentencing.
On Wednesday morning, the 6th Circuit voted 2-1 to pause the execution. Tennessee went straight to the Supreme Court. The state called her filing an “abusive, tactical delay,” SCOTUSblog reports. Shortly before 7 p.m. EDT, the justices granted the state's request in a brief, unsigned order with no explanation. CBS News reported that Gov. Bill Lee had denied clemency earlier in the week.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Sotomayor wrote that she saw “no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”
She added that Tennessee's wish to speed up the execution “by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her ‘fundamental interest in [her] own life.’”
CBS News reported that Slemmer's mother was inside the prison for most of the day.
A Tennessee Department of Correction spokesperson told the AP the state would proceed Wednesday night ahead of a midnight cutoff on its execution order. Pike's emergency request to the Supreme Court was pending when the latest coverage in the packet was published. None of it says whether the court responded.