Christa Pike still unconscious following botched execution, attorneys say

The attorneys for a death-row inmate who survived two lethal injection doses say she remains unconscious and on a ventilator following the botched execution attempt.

In a recent court filing, Christa Pike’s legal team said hospital staff were working to save her life as of late Thursday (local time), attempting to clear the two doses from her system after she was rushed from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The filing offers the first detailed account of the 50-year-old’s condition and reveals what her lawyers believe caused the medical emergency.

They allege that improperly placed IV lines caused the pentobarbital dosage to flow into her tissue rather than her bloodstream.

“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 attorneys wrote.

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Rather than fixing the placement issue, her lawyers claim the execution team instead gave a second dose of the drug.

State officials have yet to offer an explanation for what went wrong.

The failure to execute Pike, one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death row, has reignited intense national debate over the death penalty.

It has prompted Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to order an independent review and pause all upcoming executions in the state, there was one more scheduled for this year.

Republican Tennessee lawmakers have said that they should review whether to stop lethal injections and consider other options for death sentences.

Pike’s defence lawyer Randy Spivey, who counted at least seven needles in her left arm, said that the execution team worked for an hour to administer the lethal shot.

Neither the first nor the backup dose of pentobarbital worked and Pike was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the attempt.

Her attorneys have since asked a state court to order the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all evidence from the failed execution.

“Preserving this evidence is essential to understanding what happened, ensuring accountability and protecting Christa’s legal rights,” two of her attorneys said in a statement.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the 1995 stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training centre in Knoxville.

She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years.

Pike was originally scheduled to be killed by lethal injection at 10am on Wednesday (1am Thursday AEST) at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

Following the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put the brakes on”.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement.

“Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend.

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“It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

Slemmer’s mother had called for the lethal injection to go forward, saying she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

“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 last Saturday.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the US, representing about 1 per cent of all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.