Brandon Drenon
(BBC) – Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is in “critical condition, receiving life-saving care” in hospital, after surviving two lethal injection attempts, leading the state’s governor to halt all executions for the year.
“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” her lawyer Randy Spivey told reporters on Thursday. “But we do know that she is alive right now.”
Her lawyers are now asking for her sentence to be commuted. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
She was injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday but remained alive, her lawyers said. She was then sent to hospital in an ambulance.
Details have continued to emerge about what happened during the failed execution attempt.
“Last night, the execution team attempted to establish an IV line for an hour,” Spivey said.
