A judge in Nashville said she would order Tennessee state officials to preserve all evidence related to last week’s failed execution attempt of Krista Pike (who was convicted of a 1995 murder), including syringes and other instruments used during two unsuccessful attempts to administer the lethal injection, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
Details
Pike, 50, was taken to a Nashville hospital unconscious, in critical condition and with severe injuries to her arms after two injections of the caustic barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at the Riverbend maximum-security prison last Wednesday.
According to her attorneys, as of Tuesday she had regained consciousness and was talking, but remains shackled to a hospital bed as her defense team seeks to pierce the veil of secrecy that typically surrounds execution procedures in Tennessee and other states.
The attorneys argue that the failed execution — already the second in Tennessee this year — effectively constitutes torture and violates the U.S. constitutional ban on cruel or unusual punishment.
Pike, who was sentenced to death for participating, while still a teenager, in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995, is the first known person in the United States to survive a "completed execution attempt," her defense attorneys say.
They asked Davidson County Chancery Court Judge Aisha Miles to order state officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous infusion sets and straps used to restrain her on the gurney.
At the end of Wednesday’s hearing, Miles largely sided with Pike’s attorneys. She called the legal proceedings — which began in January to prevent the scheduled execution — unusual because no one had anticipated that Pike would survive.
"This case is unique, to put it mildly," Miles remarked.
She also ordered the state to preserve internal records and correspondence concerning the execution attempt, including incident reports, witness statements and encrypted messages.
The judge has not yet ruled on Pike’s attorneys’ motion to allow the Tennessee Department of Correction to provide them with the remaining drugs used during the execution for chemical analysis.
The Tennessee Department of Correction opposed what it described as a "duplicative and unnecessary" preservation order, arguing that it is already legally required to preserve all evidence.
Christa Pike is awake after failed execution - attorneys07.10.26, 09:41
In addition
Tennessee and other U.S. states have long struggled to obtain execution drugs. They cannot obtain them from major pharmaceutical companies because of a European ban on trade by companies that sell products for use in torture or executions.
Tennessee, like other states, turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies that produce small batches of drugs, promising to conceal their identities.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who rejected Pike’s request for clemency and to have her sentence commuted to life imprisonment, called the failed execution a tragedy. He suspended executions for the rest of the year and promised to conduct an investigation.
Pike’s attorneys sought an alternative to lethal injection, saying their warnings that her small veins and related medical conditions could create a risk of complications had been ignored.