Grim new details come to light about Christa Pike's botched execution
A grisly detail about Christa Pike's attempted execution has come to light as she recovers in hospital.
After originally being sentenced to death by electric chair over 30 years ago, when she was just 20 years old, Pike's sentence was eventually carried out by lethal injection, as the electric chair has since been withdrawn.
But after decades on death row and her lawyers exhausting the appeals process to call for her sentence to be reduced, Pike's death sentence was carried out, only for her to survive.
Now, it has emerged Pike's attorney Randy Spivey has said in a filing made on 22 October that the executioners tasked with carrying out Pike's sentence used around 10 needles to make IV lines into Pike's arms before the doses of pentobarbital were administered, PEOPLE reports.
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During the attempted execution Pike began to make sounds like she was choking, and executioners feared that her veins were 'blown'.
Pike ultimately survived the attempt and, in a surreal moment given that earlier people had been trying to kill her, was transferred to hospital to recover from the botched execution where she was placed on a ventilator in a critical condition.
The failure to properly carry out Pike's sentence, and the suffering she has experienced, has led to renewed debate on the use of the death penalty in the US.
Following the sentencing Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a staunch supporter of the death penalty who had previously refused to grant Pike clemency, called a halt on executions in the state pending a 'comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred'.
Robin Maher is the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, and expressed outrage at the botched execution to the New York Times, saying: “This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era. There is no precedent.”
Pike has now returned to prison, and has shared her first message since surviving her execution, saying: “Im at the prison. I love you so much!”
It is reported that Pike is now walking with more independence and can speak in full sentences.
Pike was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
While Pike was 18 at the time of the murder Tadaryl Shipp, her boyfriend at the time and accomplice was 17 and so ineligible for the death penalty.
Over the course of the fatal assault, a pentagram was carved into Slemmer's chest, and Pike kept a fragment of Slemmer's skull after killing her by hitting her head with a piece of asphalt.
During Pike's time on death row, new evidence has been brought to the attention of courts detailing a harrowing level of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse that Pike suffered as a child.
This included being sexually abused when she was a toddler, sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old, and again when she was 17 years old.
Her attorneys drew attention to this evidence and the profound psychological impact that these highly traumatic experiences had on Pike as a child, arguing that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.
Nonetheless, Pike's execution was still scheduled to go ahead.
Kit Roberts