Christa Pike Survived Two Lethal Injections and Doctors Fear Brain Damage

Christa Pike was supposed to die on Wednesday, September 30. She had spent 30 years on Tennessee’s death row for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a sentence handed down in 1996. After a long day of court fights, the state went ahead with the lethal injection anyway. She was given two doses. She was still alive afterward, and an ambulance took her to a hospital.

The execution had already been delayed for hours. A federal appeals court put a temporary hold on it, then the U.S. Supreme Court lifted that stay and let Tennessee officials proceed. What followed did not go the way the protocol said it should. One of Pike’s attorneys told BBC News she was being given life-saving measures.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, told the BBC that the gap before anyone started trying to revive her could have left lasting damage. “It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” he said.

The Nashville Banner reported that she left the prison in an ambulance at 9:28 p.m. John North, an investigative producer for WBIR TV in Knoxville who was there as a witness, said the blinds kept going up and down, and that what people in the room could see did not look like a normal execution. “It appeared that this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go, but we don’t know that,” he said.

After 11 p.m., the Tennessee Department of Correction emailed a statement saying it had followed every step of the state’s lawful execution protocol, which had been approved by the Attorney General’s Office. Officials said the lethal injection chemical had consistently worked before, and that the protocol did not allow any further procedures beyond what was carried out that night. They confirmed Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility.

Her lawyers rejected that account. “Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution,” they said.

Anesthesiology expert Dr. Daniel Medel, who runs the YouTube channel Danesthesia, has previously talked about why pentobarbital, the drug used in this kind of injection, can fail when the setup around it fails. “Several botched executions highlighted how fragile these protocols can really be,” he said.

In that video he went back to the April 2014 execution of Clayton Lockett. The IV line failed, the drugs were not given properly, and Lockett writhed before dying 43 minutes after the first drug went in. Later reviews pointed to bad IV placement, weak training, and a breakdown in the protocol.

He also described the execution of Dennis Maguire, who was given midazolam and hydromorphone and was reported gasping and snorting for 10 to 15 minutes before he was declared dead. That case set off a fight over whether those drugs could be counted on to produce a death that was not painful. Joseph Wood’s July 2014 execution used the same two drugs, lasted nearly two hours, and took 15 doses before it ended.

In Pike’s case, the drugs did not kill her as officials expected. Medel’s point was that when IV access, training, or drug preparation breaks down, the result is not quiet or quick. “It’s unpredictable and often visibly painful,” he said.

Pike was still in the hospital as questions piled up over what happened inside the chamber, and over whether the long attempt left her with lasting harm.