Medical expert warns it is ' very possible' Christa Pike has brain damage after failed execution
This story includes details some readers may find distressing
Death row killer Christa Pike is likely to have suffered brain damage after Tennessee failed to execute her by lethal injection on Wednesday, warns a medical expert.
After the procedure where seven needles were attached to the 50 years old’s arm to administer two doses of the poison pentobarbital – she asked whether what was happening to her was ‘normal’.
According to reporters who witnessed the process held at the Tennessee Department of Corrections to have lost consciousness and begun to snore loudly.
Advert
Pike was later rushed to an unnamed hospital by ambulance.
Murderer Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of her classmate Colleen Slemmer and has spent the past 30 years languishing on death row.
Her execution is one of the most high profile in recent times – she is the first female to have faced execution in the state in at least 200 years and she made headlines in the past few months when she requested the firing squad instead of lethal injection and also when she refused a final meal.
Now, according to her lawyer, she is being provided with ‘life saving measures’.
However, Dr Joel Zivot from the Emory University School of Medicine, who is also part of Pike’s legal team, said it is likely she will be brain damaged by the toxins pumped into her veins.
“It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” Zivot told the BBC.
Lawyers acting for Pike blamed her damaged veins and ‘degraded pentobarbital’ for the failure to kill her, reported the New York Post.
They said, “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
A month before her execution date, Pike's lawyers spent three days in a hearing centred almost entirely on her veins - arguing they were small and notoriously hard to access, according to The Tennessean.
When a second dose of the lethal drug combination still failed to stop her heart, her legal team moved fast, filing an emergency motion demanding she be given medical care. District Judge Clifton L. Corker granted the stay.
By the time Pike was strapped to the gurney inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution's death chamber — just before 7:30pm CDT — barely an hour had passed since the Supreme Court had overturned her earlier stay of execution.
Even hardened media witnesses who'd seen executions before were left stunned by what unfolded. When the second dose failed to take effect, Pike lifted her head, looked around the room, and asked whether the "hurting and burning" she was experiencing was normal.
“None of that was normal,” Catherine Sweeney of WPLN told reporters.
“I covered all of the executions last year and most of the ones this year; we haven’t seen anything like it.”
Michael D. Carroll