Three weeks after Christa Pike survived her failed execution, her attorney claimed that Tennessee execution team members suspected that the IV site might have “blown” before she was injected with the lethal drug.
Attorney Randy Spivey wrote in a document filed on Thursday, October 22, that the IV team went through about 10 needles and tried several IV sites on both of Pike’s arms, according to the Associated Press. The team also allegedly struggled to push saline through the last IV site that they established.
Following the failed execution on September 30, Pike, 50, was hospitalized and ultimately survived two doses of pentobarbital.
While state protocol calls for a second dose of pentobarbital if the first doesn’t kill the death row inmate, the guidelines do not indicate what happens if someone survives a second injection.
Spivey said that the execution team started trying to place the two IVs at 6:34 p.m. As the team struggled, Pike tried to help and advised them to look in her upper arm for a viable vein.
They managed to successfully place an IV in Pike’s right arm in about six minutes, but it took them nearly an hour to successfully place an IV in her left arm.
Spivey also said that Pike was clearly in pain during the process and was “wincing and grimacing” as the IV team members tried to move the needles around in her left arm. The team members even allegedly expressed doubts after they inserted the needles several times.
At 6:47 p.m., one team member said a vein “might be blowing” as they examined an IV in Pike’s left arm. However, the other two team members said they couldn’t tell. “One of them said something like, ‘it’s either blood or blown, I need to know,’” Spivey wrote.
The team tried again with a different spot, and the needle was seemingly severely bent when they pulled it out of her left arm.
“I think it’s blown,” Spivey recalled one of the IV team members saying at 7:07 p.m.
By 7:13 p.m., the team decided they successfully placed an IV in Pike’s left arm, so they taped her hands down and hooked her to a heart monitor.
Pike went on to express that she was in pain and that her arm felt like it was going to “bust.”
When the second injection didn’t work, Spivey called fellow attorneys at 8:22 p.m. and asked them to stop the execution because a third dose was not authorized under the state’s protocol.
Pike’s failed execution has highlighted issues with how Tennessee carries out death sentences, and Spivey’s recent court document was part of a separate legal proceeding in which Tennessee’s death row inmates are now challenging its lethal injection procedures.
“Our predictions about the likelihood of botched executions have come true — and will continue to come true — without substantial change,” attorney Kit Thomas, who is representing people on death row in the case, said.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 after she was found guilty of killing her college classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
