Austin Sarat has identified Christa Pike as one of only two people known to have survived an execution after the process was fully activated.
Sarat, a professor of law and politics at Amherst College in Massachusetts, has spent years researching executions dating back to the 1890s. He told WVLT that most failed lethal injections happen before the procedure is completed, typically because medical staff cannot locate a vein or establish an intravenous line. Pike’s case stands apart because she reportedly survived after receiving two doses of the drugs intended to kill her.
“She’s the only one to have survived after receiving a dose of the drugs that were supposed to kill her, and in her case, two doses,” Sarat said.
He added that the case had surprised him, although his previous research into botched executions had prepared him for the possibility that a procedure could go wrong.
The other person in this exceptionally small group was Willie Francis, a Louisiana teenager who survived an electrocution in 1946 before being put to death the following year. Francis was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana in 1946 after being convicted of murder. However, the electric chair failed to kill him, with court records indicating that insufficient electricity had been supplied. He survived and was returned to his cell.
Francis subsequently obtained legal representation and appealed to the US Supreme Court in an effort to prevent the state from executing him again. The court ruled that Louisiana could proceed with a second execution. Its opinion assumed the state had conducted the first attempt carefully and humanely, while acknowledging that accidents could occur without anyone being responsible. Francis was executed in 1947.
Sarat’s findings place Pike in this exceptionally small group of people who have survived an execution that progressed beyond the initial stages. He said: “Only Willie Francis and Christa Pike have gotten to the point where the execution mechanism was fully engaged and ended up surviving their execution.”
The distinction matters because an execution can fail for several reasons, and many reported incidents do not involve the complete activation of the method intended to cause death. Sarat also stressed that no execution method could guarantee the intended outcome.
Pike remains on Tennessee’s death row, while her legal team continues efforts to have her sentence commuted to life imprisonment, with or without the possibility of parole.
Sarat is continuing to investigate what it means to survive an execution and then face the possibility of being subjected to the process again. “I want to understand what it is like to survive your own execution and face the prospect of returning to the execution chamber,” he said.
Pike’s botched execution occurred when two doses of lethal injection drugs failed to stop her heart, leaving her unconscious for days before she awoke and began speaking limitedly, according to her attorneys.
Pike’s lawyers are seeking to have her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.