A new court filing says Tennessee’s execution team warned that Christa Pike’s vein “might be blowing” and still went ahead with the lethal drugs, which failed to kill her.
Story Highlights
- Pike’s attorney filed the account in court on Thursday, October 22, describing her failed execution on Wednesday, September 30.
- The attorney says the IV team went through about 10 needles in both arms before the drugs were given.
- One team member warned a vein “might be blowing,” and Pike later said, “I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns.”
- Pike survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital and spent days on a ventilator; the state says it followed its protocol.
Filing describes repeated failed IV attempts before the drugs were given
Christa Pike was convicted of torturing and killing her classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, when Pike was 18. Tennessee tried to execute her by lethal injection, but she lived. Her attorney, Randy Spivey, watched from inside the prison and wrote the new account. He filed it in a separate lawsuit in which Tennessee death row prisoners are challenging the way the state carries out lethal injections. Attorney Kit Thomas represents the prisoners in that case, and the Pike account is part of it.
The state’s rules call for two IV lines, one in each arm. An IV is a thin tube put into a vein so drugs go straight into the blood. Spivey says the team started at 6:34 p.m. and set the right arm in about six minutes. The left arm took far longer. Pike was “wincing and grimacing” as the team moved the needles, he wrote, and the team tried several spots on both arms.
Warnings inside the chamber
At 6:57 p.m., one team member said a vein “might be blowing,” according to the filing. A blown vein is one that breaks open, so drugs can leak into the flesh around it instead of flowing into the blood. Two other team members said they could not tell. One said, “it’s either blood or blown, I need to know.” At 7:07 p.m., a team member said, “I think it’s blown,” and a needle pulled from her left arm looked badly bent, Spivey wrote. The team also struggled to push saline, a salt-water rinse used to test the line, through the last IV it set.
At 7:13 p.m., the team decided a line in her left arm was working. Around 7:34 p.m., Pike said her arm hurt: “I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns.” Over the next half hour, Spivey says, she strained, flinched and seemed to struggle to breathe. The state’s rules allow a second dose if the first does not work, but they do not say what to do after that. At 8:22 p.m., Spivey called fellow attorneys and asked them to stop the execution.
Two doses, a ventilator and the state’s response
Pike was taken to a hospital by ambulance and was on a ventilator, a breathing machine, for several days. Her lawyers said in an earlier filing that problems with the IV lines sent the drug into her body instead of her bloodstream. “Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown,” they wrote. They also said blisters formed on her arms after the injections. Pike later woke up, left the hospital and went back to prison.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed every step of the state’s execution protocol, which calls for pentobarbital. The state has not released its own record of what happened in the chamber. Governor Bill Lee said in early October that the state’s prisons chief, Correction Commissioner Frank Strada, would resign after the failed execution. Pike has no new execution date.
Pattern of lethal injection failures often centers on IV access
Pike’s case is not the first in which an execution went wrong over IV lines. One 2022 report found seven executions or attempts that year went badly, more than a third of the total, and in some of them teams struggled for a long time to find a vein. The drug only works when it reaches the blood in a large enough amount. When it leaks into the tissue, it can cause pain and injury without doing what it was meant to do.
Accountability, protocol clarity and public confidence
Pike was convicted of a brutal killing more than 30 years ago. Supporters of the death penalty and its opponents can agree on one thing: when the state carries out a sentence this serious, it has to be done right. The prisoners’ lawsuit challenges how Tennessee carries out lethal injections, and the Pike filing puts a minute-by-minute account from inside the room before the court.
Sources:
pbs.org, apnews.com, wkrn.com, pbs.org, tennessean.com, apnews.com, npr.org
