Christa Pike survives two lethal injections as Tennessee halts executions after failed execution
Death row inmate Christa Pike has been taken to hospital after she was still alive following two lethal injections.
Christa’s heart was still beating and she was heard snoring despite being given doses of pentobarbital during her execution.
Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, is said to have been rushed to hospital after her legal team handed in an emergency motion to stop her execution while it was happening.
She was heard ‘audibly snoring’ and her heart was still beating while losing consciousness, BBC News reports citing her legal team.
Several witnesses following the execution attempt reported hearing Pike breathe and snore loudly even when the curtains of the execution chamber were drawn.
One of her attorneys told the broadcaster that the 50-year-old was being ‘provided life-saving measures’ in hospital.
She is said to have been given two doses of pentobarbital.
Tennessee’s Department of Corrections has not yet confirmed Pike’s condition.
The state’s governor, Bill Lee, confirmed he has ordered a review ‘to determine exactly what occured,’ ABC News reports.
He added that the remaining scheduled execution will not be carried out this year.
It would have been the state’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years.
The execution was halted just an hour earlier by an appeals court, which wanted to consider whether Pike’s alleged childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered before her sentencing.
But the Supreme Court overturned the delay yesterday, and the execution went ahead.
Why was Christa Pike convicted?
Pike and her then boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and tortured to death 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
The case garnered widespread attention at the time of the killing in part because a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s and 1990s.
After the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
She claimed she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t ‘put the brakes on.’
At the time Pike believed Slemmer was trying to steal Shipp — a fellow student with whom she shared an interest in satanic imagery — away from her, although friends of the victim denied this.
Prosecutors said that Slemmer was kicked, beaten and slashed for half an hour, and that Pike carved a pentagram into her chest while she was still alive, before she died from blows to the head with a chunk of asphalt.
Slemmer’s half-naked body was found the next morning, with her blood-soaked clothes hanging above her on tree branches.
All the teenagers involved were arrested within 36 hours, with investigators discovering a satanic Bible and altar in Pike’s room, along with a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.
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