Christa Pike breaks silence, says constant pain after failed Tennessee execution

First words since the failed execution

Christa Pike, 50, said on Friday, 30 October, that she has been in pain since her execution attempt on 30 September. She dictated the statement to her legal team, and her lawyers released it. Pike said she had made her peace before entering the execution chamber, expecting to die, and woke days later alone and confused in a hospital bed. She still struggles to speak, and she describes a suffering that reaches beyond her body, into her mind and soul. She also thanked the medical workers who saved her life. She put her pain plainly in the statement.

“There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain.”

What went wrong during the execution

Her lawyers have said she was left with burned and blistered arms, pneumonia, serious swelling in her arms and difficulty swallowing. Medical and lethal injection experts are examining whether a fault in the intravenous line let the pentobarbital collect in the surrounding tissue instead of reaching her bloodstream. Pike has blamed incompetence for the failure and said her suffering goes beyond her physical injuries. Governor Bill Lee ordered an investigation into what happened and postponed the state's other lethal injection planned for this year. The head of the state's prison system has resigned, while the Tennessee Department of Correction has defended its method without yet explaining why the execution did not go as planned.

Her condition and where she is held

She spent her first few days in hospital unconscious and on a ventilator. She has since been returned to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she is kept in the infirmary and largely isolated from other inmates. Pike said she had spent 28 years in solitary confinement, and she sees much of her present situation as a repetition of that. The Death Penalty Information Center describes her as the only person known to have survived lethal injection during an execution. She says she is trying to make sense of what happened to her.

What happens next

Lee has told reporters that he expects her sentence to stay the same unless the courts decide otherwise, while her lawyers have asked him to reduce it to life imprisonment. CNN reported that she now faces what looks like a long legal fight to block a second attempt to execute her. It is not clear whether or when Tennessee would try again. Pike ended her statement on her uncertain future and said she is trying to heal one day at a time. She described that uncertainty in her own words.

“I don't know why I survived that night. I don't know what comes next.”

The 1995 killing and the case behind the execution

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend tortured and killed her 19-year-old classmate in 1995, after meeting the victim at a job training camp for disadvantaged young people. The killing took place in a remote area near Knoxville, and Pike was sentenced to death in 1996. Her co-defendant was not an adult at the time of the crime, so he did not face the death penalty and remains in prison. The victim's mother, who attended the failed execution, called it a "fiasco" and told a local ABC News affiliate in Florida that the state owes her an apology. Separately, LaSexta reports that Tennessee has executed 17 people since 1977 and that 42 people are on death row.

Executed since 197717

On death row42

Executed since 1977

17 people

On death row

42 people

Data from the article text