Christa Pike Is First Person To Survive Death Row With Drugs in Her System — and Double Jeopardy May Bar Tennessee From Trying Again

Christa Pike survived something no prisoner in modern American history has ever lived through.Others have survived a trip to the death chamber, but in every lethal injection case before hers, the execution team gave up before a single lethal dose went in. Ms. Pike, 50, is the first known case in which the drugs actually moved through her body and yet she did not die.Tennessee tried to execute her Wednesday night after the nation’s highest court cleared the way, injecting pentobarbital, the single drug in the state’s protocol. She was still breathing, gasping and snoring when witnesses were escorted out, and she was taken by ambulance to a Nashville hospital. Gov. Bill Lee has since suspended all executions for the rest of the year and ordered a third-party review.“What’s unprecedented here is that the drugs started to flow and she survived,” a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, Austin Sarat, tells The New York Sun. “There have been botched lethal injections, mostly where the doctor can’t find the vein, but this is the first actual survivor.”That distinction may matter more in court than it does in the chamber.The Double Jeopardy QuestionCourts have held that with lethal injection, the punishment does not begin until the drugs start to flow, which is why a state can try again after a failed IV. With Ms. Pike, the drugs did flow, so the punishment had begun, and the ban on punishing someone twice for the same crime, known as double jeopardy, would seem to apply, Mr. Sarat says.“Courts have not said you can’t try again to execute her,” he explains. “If the state is going to execute someone, whatever the technology, it has an obligation to do it right. And if it doesn’t do it right, you only get one bite at the apple.”A second rule could also stop the state. A prisoner who cannot understand why she is being executed cannot be put to death, so that brain damage could end the case. No court has said so, and Ms. Pike’s condition is said to be “critical.” One of her doctors, Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, has said she may have a brain injury because resuscitation was delayed.A professor of law and the founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at Fordham Law School, Deborah Denno, also tells the Sun that Ms. Pike’s case is “unprecedented,” although her condition is still unclear.Ms. Denno notes that brain damage is possible and that Ms. Pike is likely “severely traumatized, and still suffering physically from the process itself.”Ms. Pike’s attorneys did not immediately respond to the Sun’s request for comment on her status. Gov. Bill Lee, who denied her clemency appeal Monday, has suspended all scheduled executions for the year and ordered a third-party review. It is the second time he has halted executions. In 2022, he paused them over improperly tested drugs. He has also said there will be no new attempt on Ms. Pike before the year ends, and he called what happened a tragedy.An all-female firing squad, which Ms. Pike requested as an alternative method and was denied, is a separate fight. Prisoners challenging a method must propose an alternative, so the failure may not change the law long term.Why the Drugs FailedTennessee has not said how anyone survives two full doses, yet experts are offering competing theories.The first points to the people. The state’s second botched attempt in five months, after Tony Carruthers in May, was overseen by the same physician, Mark Fowler. Dr. Fowler confirmed in August that he would oversee Ms. Pike’s execution, even after her attorneys argued that the Carruthers attempt showed he was incompetent at placing the central lines these cases can require. In a deposition, he said he last placed one around 2013.“They fail because of incompetent executioners, medically challenged inmates, a poor protocol, and a range of problems inherent to the process itself that have existed for decades,” Ms. Denno says. “It’s rare, if not unprecedented, for someone to survive two doses.”A second theory is that the drug never reached the places it needed to.“So medicines are absorbed in different ways and act in different ways,” a Tennessee-based emergency physician, Matt Tipton, tells the Sun. “So the drug needed the IV to turn everything off quickly. But when it was effectively subcutaneous because they missed, she survived. That’s my impression.”In other words, a drug meant to flow into a vein may have pooled under the skin, where it works far more slowly. Dr. Zivot has said the pentobarbital in her blood likely never reached a level high enough to stop her breathing and heartbeat.A third is that the drug itself was flawed. Her attorneys, Randall Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement that their warnings had proved right, citing difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital and no emergency medical care on hand and calling the protocol one shrouded in secrecy.A fourth involves her hair. Witnesses described Ms. Pike as having curly, blondish-red hair. Researchers have long suspected that people with naturally red hair, who typically carry a variant of a gene known as MC1R, may need more anesthesia to reach the same level of sedation. One small study in the journal Anesthesiology found that women with red hair needed about 19 percent more of an inhaled anesthetic than women with dark hair, though later research has been mixed. The study looked at medical anesthesia, not executions, and no official has suggested the idea applies here.Critics say that is the problem with how executions are carried out. The protocol sets a five-gram dose, not a dose for the patient, so gender, height and weight are not taken into consideration.“It’s not a medical procedure. If I go into a hospital and they’re going to give me drugs to sedate me, they carefully calculate my body mass index, what experience I’ve had, whether I have allergies or reactions. That’s not what happens in lethal injection. It’s one size fits all,” Mr. Sarat says.Those Who Walked Away, and What Comes NextFailed lethal injections are not new; however, they have always stopped short of this. “Eight percent of all lethal injections have been botched,” Mr. Sarat says. A botched execution usually still ends in death, he stresses. A failed one does not.“In the last 80 years in the United States, only eight or nine people have survived an execution,” he says. “Those are failed executions, not botched executions.”The list begins with Willie Francis, a Louisiana teenager convicted of shooting a pharmacist, who survived the electric chair in 1946 and was executed a year later. The modern cases are all lethal injections called off when staff could not find a usable vein:Romell Broom, who killed a 14-year-old girl in Cleveland, was stuck 18 times in Ohio in 2009.Alva Campbell, a carjacking killer, in Ohio in 2017.Doyle Hamm, who shot a motel clerk, in Alabama in 2018.Alan Miller, who killed three coworkers, and Kenneth Smith, convicted of a murder for hire, both in Alabama in 2022. Alabama later executed both with nitrogen gas.Thomas Creech, who killed a fellow inmate in Idaho in 2024, after eight failed attempts.Mr. Carruthers, convicted of a triple murder in Memphis, in May.In every one of those lethal injection cases, officials called it off before a single lethal dose went in.Most states have stayed with lethal injection despite its record, believing it to be the most “humane” despite its troubled track record. However, Idaho made the firing squad its primary method in July.“They [states] keep using lethal injection because there are no other viable alternatives with the exception of the firing squad, and they think that may look barbaric,” Ms. Denno adds. “It’s hard to predict going forward whether there will be any changes because states are so desperate to execute, at any cost.”Ms. Pike was 18 in 1995 when she and her boyfriend killed a fellow job training student, Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville. He was 17 and got a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Ms. Slemmer’s mother has waited decades to see Ms. Pike’s sentence carried out. It is unclear whether that day will come.

Christa Pike Is First Person To Survive Death Row With Drugs in Her System — and Double Jeopardy May Bar Tennessee From Trying Again

Christa Pike Is First Person To Survive Death Row With Drugs in Her System — and Double Jeopardy May Bar Tennessee From Trying Again

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