Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has ordered a review after officials failed to put death row inmate Christa Gail Pike to death on Wednesday, administering two doses of pentobarbital without rendering her unconscious.
Pike was convicted at 19 years old over the brutal 1995 torture and murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was sentenced to death in 1996. At the time of her incarceration, she was the youngest person on death row.
She had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. on Sept. 30, but it was delayed until the evening after an appeals court stay had temporarily halted the execution.
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday.
Media witnesses observing from a separate room said officials raised curtains to the execution chamber at 7:27 p.m., showing Pike strapped to a gurney.
“I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love,” she said in her so-called last words. She described herself as at peace. But Pike remained awake.
By 8:26 p.m., execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.
Pike was heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8:53 p.m. At that time, there was an announcement to escort media witnesses out of the area.
Lee said in a statement on Wednesday that he has ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that a rescheduled execution would not take place this year.
“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that they “followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.”
“The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility,” it added.
Official procedures dictate the administration of a secondary backup injection if the inmate is not deceased after the initial injection, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction Lethal Injection Protocol.
“If the inmate is not deceased, a Backup Set B of syringes is prepared, the blinds are reopened, and steps 5 through 8 are repeated,” it says.
The U.S. Supreme Court late on Sept. 30 lifted a lower court’s stay of execution for Pike, clearing the way for Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than 200 years.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
In an unsigned order, the court majority did not provide reasons for vacating the stay.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit halted the lethal injection execution about an hour before it was scheduled to start on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
The 10 a.m. execution was paused after the Sixth Circuit requested more time to determine whether Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse was fully presented when a jury convicted her and sentenced her to death in 1996.
Not long after, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked the Supreme Court to lift the stay.
According to the recent legal filing in the Pike v. State of Tennessee U.S. Supreme Court Docket, on Jan. 12, 1995, Pike beat, tortured, and killed Slemmer because Pike “just felt mean that day.”
In 2004, she received a separate concurrent 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of another inmate in 2001. Here she choked the victim into unconsciousness with a shoelace.
Slemmer’s mother had traveled to Nashville in the hopes of witnessing the execution of her daughter’s killer.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Saturday.
The Associated Press and Matthew Vadum contributed to this report.
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