How a Failed Execution Left Christa Pike Hovering Between Life and Death
New York Times · LC · trust 42/100
Her legal team had repeatedly warned that her execution could go wrong. On Wednesday, they were proven right.
Listen · 7:58 min Share full article Emergency vehicles arrived at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday after the failed execution of Christa Pike. Credit... Denny Simmons/The Tennessean, via USA Today Network, via Reuters By Shaila Dewan and Emily Cochrane
The next morning, journalists gathered in a tent in the parking lot of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, along the Cumberland River on the outskirts of Nashville, to monitor the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Demonstrators, most of them opposed to the death penalty, amassed in a field on the prison grounds.
The execution was set for 10 a.m. on Wednesday. But the careful choreography of the day almost immediately went off track. By evening, Ms. Pike would survive two separate attempts to inject her with execution drugs, bringing horrified reactions, renewed scrutiny of the death penalty and the second moratorium on executions in Tennessee in the past five years.
Many questions remain about exactly what went wrong. The Tennessee Department of Correction has said that it followed its lethal injection protocol to the letter. But the protocol does not lay out what should happen if two attempts to kill a condemned prisoner fail.
Ms. Pike remains unconscious and on a ventilator at a Nashville hospital, her fate still an open question . This account of her failed execution has been pieced together from the witnesses and lawyer who were at Riverbend.
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