Two doses of a lethal injection drug have failed to kill Christa Gail Pike, a 50-year-old woman who was due to be executed on Wednesday. Pike was taken to hospital after it was found that her heart was still beating following the procedure. Pike would have been the first woman in more than 200 years to be put to death in Tennessee and was the only woman on the state’s death row.
Her attempted execution with doses of the sedative pentobarbital went ahead despite a last-minute stay by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, which was overturned just an hour before her execution by the Supreme Court. Human rights experts said the botched execution illustrates why the death penalty is inhumane and should be abolished. Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has represented many American death row inmates as well as detainees held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre, told Al Jazeera: “I’ve been in the execution chamber with six of my clients and it’s never the clinical process they’d have you believe.
And it’s always a desperate midnight struggle to stop it.” He added: “In the end, you have to question whether this makes the world a better, more civilised place. Why, indeed, do we kill people to prove that killing people is wrong?” Ahead of the planned execution, Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN special rapporteur on arbitrary executions, told the UK’s Times newspaper: “If executed, Christa Pike would be a victim of torture to death. This will be a gross violation of human rights.” Here’s what we know about what happens when an execution goes wrong.
Pike was found guilty of the murder of another young woman she had viewed as a romantic rival, when she was aged 18, more than 30 years ago. In January 1995, Pike, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, into a wooded area and tortured and killed her. All four were students at a Job Corps vocational centre in Knoxville.
The case attracted huge public interest, especially after it was revealed that the attackers had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, which Shipp later admitted to doing. Pike, who delivered the killing blow to the victim’s head, smashing her skull, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull afterwards. Pike and Shipp confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996.
Pike was sentenced to death; Shipp, who was 17 at the time and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, received life with the possibility of parole. Her case is highly unusual in that she is a woman and was a teenager when she carried out the murder. Other death row inmates who were convicted at the age of 18 – all men – have had their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.
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