Christa Pike Still Fighting for Life After Surviving Her Own Execution

Christa Pike was supposed to die in a Tennessee execution chamber last Wednesday. Four days later, the 50 year old is still alive, still unconscious, and still on a ventilator in a heavily guarded hospital room while doctors try to get two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital out of her system.

Her legal team says the drugs never properly reached her bloodstream. In a court filing, they said problems with the IV lines meant the pentobarbital went into her body instead of circulating the way the protocol intended. By Sunday, assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell told CNN’s State of the Union that nothing had really changed.

She was still critically ill. Doctors still did not know her prognosis, and they might not know for several days. Ferrell said he was not aware of her waking up at any point after the attempt.

The longer outlook is just as unsettled. Ferrell said she may not fully recover, and that her lawyers have had no real talks yet about what the state plans to do next. The Tennessee attorney general’s office, he said, has not told them what its intentions are.

Her attorneys have also described what her arms looked like afterward. They said both arms were swollen, burned, and blistered, and that one arm appeared to turn purple during the procedure. According to the defense, she could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing heavily. At one point she reportedly said, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.” Later she asked, “Does this happen like that?”

Defense attorney Randy Spivey has been blunt about what he saw in Nashville. He said the execution team spent about an hour trying to find a usable vein. He counted at least seven needles in her left arm alone, and said one looked bent when it was pulled out after a failed attempt.

Dr. Joel Zivot, an Atlanta anesthesiologist and surgeon brought in by the defense, thinks the veins ruptured and the catheters slipped out of place. In his view, the pentobarbital then went into the tissue around the vein, which would explain the burns. Pentobarbital is known to do that. He also said one thing is clear. Enough of the drug never reached her bloodstream to kill her. If the dose Tennessee uses actually gets into circulation and to the brain the way it is meant to, he said, it kills. The fact that she is still alive, in his opinion, means that never happened.

There is no specific antidote for pentobarbital. In severe barbiturate poisoning, treatment is mostly intensive care while the body breaks the drug down. That can mean a ventilator, which Pike is already on, along with close watching of blood pressure, heart function, oxygen, and organ function. In the worst cases, doctors sometimes turn to hemodialysis, a form of blood filtration, to speed removal. Published cases of massive pentobarbital poisoning have used it. Her lawyers have said hospital staff are working to clear the drug. They have not publicly confirmed that filtration is underway.

Ferrell is now pressing for the sentence to be reduced. “At the very least, the governor should commute Ms Pike’s death sentence to a life sentence,” he said. He argued she has already endured a torturous attempt to execute her, on top of earlier requests for clemency. A spokeswoman for the defense team said Sunday that they appreciate respect for Christa’s privacy.

Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were convicted of torturing and killing 19 year old Colleen Slemmer at a job training center in Knoxville in 1995. Pike was 18. Shipp was 17 and received life with the possibility of parole. Pike has never denied killing Slemmer. Supporters have long argued the state should weigh her age, her mental illness, and a history of severe sexual abuse that started in childhood.

The failure has also shaken Tennessee’s prison leadership. Frank Strada, commissioner of the Department of Correction, is stepping down this month while an independent review looks at what went wrong. Governor Bill Lee ordered that review to determine how the attempt failed and how the state ended up in a situation it had no clear protocol for.