By Jonathan Allen
Oct 1 (Reuters) – Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called the failed execution of Christa Pike a tragedy on Thursday, hours after she survived two lethal injection attempts at a Nashville prison and was taken to a hospital.
“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee, a Republican, told reporters. “It’s a tragedy, and it’s deeply disturbing to me that that has happened in this state. The people deserve better and we’re going to make sure that happens.”
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after a jury convicted her of a murder she carried out as a teenager. Her botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the second this year in Tennessee, highlights the difficulties US states face in carrying out lethal injections.
Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. Prison officials injected two syringes into Pike, her lawyers said in a late-night court filing, causing her “unnecessary agony” but not killing her.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections said the execution was halted, and she was taken away in an ambulance, but her condition was unclear on Thursday. She would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries.
Lee told reporters that it was unclear what went wrong. He said he had no update on Pike’s condition and had not spoken with her family. After the botched execution, he ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday’s failed attempt.
Most countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Pike’s case showed that the US should follow suit.
“The prolonged suffering – physical and mental – arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent, and cruel,” Turk said in a statement on X.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a third companion lured Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder.
Pike’s lawyers and supporters tried unsuccessfully to halt Pike’s execution by pointing to her young age at the time of the crime, her history of childhood sexual abuse and untreated mental illness.
The US Supreme Court threw out an 11th-hour stay on Wednesday issued by a lower court.
Tennessee halted the execution of convicted murderer Tony Carruthers in May after prison officials were unable to set up intravenous lines to administer the lethal drugs.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting line for Emma Farge in Geneva; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Mark Porter)
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