Christa Pike is unconscious and on a ventilator after surviving a lethal injection, her lawyers say

Christa Pike is unconscious, intubated, and on a ventilator after a failed lethal injection left her critically ill, according to her lawyers.

Pike, 50, was injected with two doses of pentobarbital but survived. She was transported by ambulance from a Tennessee prison to a Nashville-area hospital on Wednesday. She remains critically ill, and hospital staff are working to save her life and clear pentobarbital from her system.

Inside the execution chamber

Prison officials tried to start intravenous lines using at least seven needles on Pike, according to her lawyers. At one point, Pike herself offered guidance on where to place the IV lines. One needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed. Pike could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly throughout the procedure, her lawyers said. Prison staff then prepared a backup set of syringes and administered another lethal dose. “Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body,” her lawyers wrote in a court filing.

Why she survived

Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike’s defence team, said the doses were enough that she would have surely died had the drug entered her bloodstream in normal circulation. The only possible explanation for her survival, he said, is that the pentobarbital blood level was never high enough to cause death. The drug was more likely to have spread across the tissue under her skin instead of entering her bloodstream. Zivot said Pike’s thrombocytosis, a blood-clotting condition, may have formed blood clots at the injection site that blocked the drug from entering her veins. Upon arrival at the hospital, both of Pike’s arms were swollen, burned, and blistered, her lawyers wrote. Zivot also said that if the pentobarbital was degraded, it could be due to poor manufacturing or improper storage.

Legal fallout and state response

Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion on Friday to preserve evidence and state records related to the botched execution. They called the experience “chemical torture” and are seeking to have her sentence commuted to life in prison. Governor Bill Lee has halted all executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review into the botched execution. The Tennessee Department of Correction defended the method, saying the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out. Authorities have not said whether they will try again to execute Pike.

The crime and the road to execution

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured, and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995 in Knoxville. Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend. Shipp was 17 at the time, so he was spared the death penalty under state law; he was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole and remains in prison. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996. She is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and she would have been the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years. The US Supreme Court thwarted two separate efforts to stop the lethal injection, and the governor denied a clemency request. Pike’s attorneys had previously warned that her thrombocytosis and small veins risked unnecessary pain and suffering during a lethal injection.