Tennessee prepared to carry out its first execution of a woman in more than 200 years.
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the final legal obstacle. Then the execution itself went horribly wrong.
Christa Pike remained alive Wednesday night after prison officials appeared to administer two rounds of lethal drugs, according to her attorneys and media witnesses inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
The startling breakdown capped a day of judicial whiplash that began when a divided federal appeals court halted Pike’s execution roughly an hour before it was scheduled to begin.
The first major turn came shortly before witnesses had expected the 50-year-old inmate to be put to death.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit entered what it called a short stay while it considered Pike’s request to reopen an old federal habeas case.
The 2-1 panel said it needed enough time to resolve whether her filing was a permissible motion or an unauthorized second attempt to challenge her conviction. Judge Richard Griffin dissented.
The dispute centered on evidence about Pike’s childhood abuse that her lawyers said was never adequately presented during the penalty phase of her 1996 trial.
The district court had ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to reopen the case, but the appeals panel had not yet decided whether that conclusion was correct when the execution clock ran down.
The majority therefore paused the execution long enough to consider the procedural question. Griffin argued that Pike’s filing was plainly a successive habeas petition and that the panel had no authority to stop the sentence.
Tennessee immediately went to the Supreme Court.
The state’s emergency application accused Pike’s lawyers of waiting until the last possible moment and asked the justices to enforce a murder judgment that had stood for 30 years.
The filing also returned the focus to the person too often lost in the legal maneuvering: 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike and two accomplices lured Slemmer to a secluded area in Knoxville in January 1995. Pike beat, cut and tortured her classmate during an attack that lasted at least 30 minutes, then crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt.
Pike took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy and later showed it to other students. Those facts were established at trial, and Pike has never denied killing her.
A Knox County jury convicted Pike of premeditated first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced her to death. She was 18 when she committed the crime.
The Supreme Court granted Tennessee’s request Wednesday evening, vacating the Sixth Circuit’s stay and putting the execution back on.
The three liberal justices dissented.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that the appeals court should have been allowed to finish considering Pike’s legal claim before the state took an irreversible step.
With the stay gone, Tennessee moved forward hours after the execution’s original 10 a.m. Central start time.
What followed was extraordinary.
Media witnesses inside Riverbend reported that officials appeared to administer two doses of pentobarbital. Pike remained alive and could be heard snoring.
The viewing-room curtain closed at 7:46 p.m., reopened three minutes later and closed again at 8:06 p.m. The microphone was cut around 8:53 p.m., and witnesses were escorted out without a full explanation from the Tennessee Department of Correction.
Emergency vehicles were seen entering and leaving the prison.
A department spokeswoman told the witnesses that she could not immediately explain what had happened. The state did not announce Pike’s death, and the execution team did not return to the viewing room to complete the normal witness briefing.
The sequence came hours after the original execution time because state officials had waited for the Supreme Court to resolve the stay. That delay left Tennessee attempting to carry out the sentence late in the day under an execution warrant that was due to expire at midnight.
Pike’s attorneys raced back to the courts, arguing that the failed procedure had left her in unnecessary agony and asking that officials begin lifesaving measures.
Tennessee had been warned that its lethal-injection process could fail.
Earlier court filings said the state’s protocol called for a backup set of syringes if the inmate remained alive after the first dose. The same records noted that Tennessee abandoned another attempted execution in May after officials could not establish the required intravenous lines.
Pike’s lawyers had challenged the protocol for months, citing her blood disorder and the risk of complications. Courts rejected those claims before Wednesday’s execution date.
None of that changes what Pike did to Colleen Slemmer.
Slemmer begged for her life while Pike and her accomplices continued the attack. Her mother, May Martinez, then waited more than three decades for the sentence imposed by a Tennessee jury to be carried out.
That family was forced through one last-minute stay, a Supreme Court reversal and then a failed execution attempt in a single day.
Read the full Supreme Court ruling here. The majority’s operative order is only two sentences before Sotomayor’s dissent, vacating the Sixth Circuit stay and legally clearing Tennessee to proceed.
The majority did not explain its reasoning. It simply granted the warden’s application and erased the appeals court’s order.
Sotomayor wrote that the lower court had asked only for time to decide a still-pending legal issue. She accused the majority of allowing an irreversible punishment before that review could be completed.
That disagreement concerned judicial process. Pike’s conviction for Slemmer’s murder and the death sentence imposed by the jury had already survived decades of state and federal appeals.
The high court’s action gave Tennessee the legal authority it requested. The order did not address the Department of Correction’s ability to finish a delayed lethal injection before the warrant expired, the medical complications Pike’s attorneys had raised, or the contingency plan if two sets of drugs failed.
A court order can remove a legal barrier. It cannot make a state execution team competent.
By late Wednesday, Pike was still alive, witnesses had been removed, and Tennessee had not publicly explained what happened behind the closed curtain.
The legal fight may have reached the Supreme Court. The execution did not reach its intended end.
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[ H/T WLT Report ]
