Woman in critical condition after surviving Tennessee execution

NEW YORK — Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike was critically ill and receiving "life-saving medical care" in a Nashville hospital on Thursday hours after she survived a failed execution with two lethal injection attempts, her lawyers said.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of a murder she carried out at 18 years old. Her botched execution on Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution was the second this year in Tennessee.

"Christa is alive right now," Randall Spivey, one of Pike's lawyers who was a witness at the execution attempt, told reporters on Thursday afternoon. "We don't have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now."

Her lawyers repeated their calls for Pike's sentence to be commuted to life in prison after enduring what they called "chemical torture". Tennessee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while it investigates the incident.

While botched lethal injections are not rare, they usually involve difficulties at the first step: setting intravenous lines in the condemned prisoner's body. Pike's case is unusual in that prison officials appeared to succeed in injecting the drugs into her with two syringes, causing her right arm to "turn purple" and her skin to blister at the injection sites, Spivey said.

She appears to be the first person known to have survived after execution drugs entered her body, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group in Washington.

"This failed attempt is the worst we've ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era," Robin Maher, the center's director, said in a statement.

After the second injection, Pike said her arm hurt and felt like it was "about to explode", her lawyers said, suggesting to them that the execution drugs had gone into her arm tissue rather than directly into the bloodstream.

Pike, who would have been the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries, has a blood condition and feared that something would go wrong with lethal injections, her lawyers say.

Her lawyers unsuccessfully petitioned the state to consider alternative methods, such as death by hanging or firing squad.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike's clemency appeal to commute her sentence to life in prison on Monday, ordered a suspension of scheduled executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and a third-party review of Wednesday's failed attempt.

"There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen," Lee, a Republican, told reporters. "It's a tragedy. … The people deserve better and we're going to make sure that happens."

US prison systems typically rely on small, lightly regulated compounding pharmacies in procurement processes that are shrouded in secrecy.

Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in 2024. It was unclear where it procured the drugs for Wednesday's failed execution, information that Pike's lawyers say was also withheld from them.

AGENCIES VIA XINHUA