May Martinez says Tennessee officials “f—– up” after watching Christa Pike survive two lethal injections.
Martinez, the mother of Pike’s 1995 murder victim Colleen Slemmer, had traveled from Florida to Nashville expecting to witness the execution of her daughter’s killer. Instead she sat in the witness room at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution as the procedure collapsed into what she later called “a mess” in a Thursday morning phone interview.
“They went to try to execute her, and she didn’t die,” Martinez said.
The attempt began around 8 p.m. Local time Wednesday. Two full doses of pentobarbital failed to kill Pike, 50, and her lawyers say she was audibly snoring after both injections. Her legal team filed an emergency motion to halt the execution and provide medical care. District Judge Clifton L. Corker granted the motion, noting in his order that “medical personnel have begun to administer medical care as requested in the motion.” Pike’s attorney said she was then “being provided life-saving measures” at a hospital.
Martinez said execution officials kept witnesses in the dark throughout the failure. “We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner. And he said that it didn’t work, that it didn’t work, and she’s on her way to the hospital,” she said.
Asked what she would tell Governor Bill Lee and the attorney general, Martinez replied: “They f—– up,” She added that Pike showed no remorse during the execution attempt.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an Emory University School of Medicine professor retained by Pike’s lawyers, said in an email that Pike likely never reached a blood level of pentobarbital high enough to cause apnea and cardiovascular failure.
“It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” he said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has defended its handling of the execution. Spokesperson Dorinda Carter told the Tennessean newspaper the department followed every step of its protocol, which was approved by the Attorney General’s Office.
“The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening,” Carter said.
That protocol requires a second set of syringes if the first fails, but does not specify what happens if the inmate remains alive after both. Reports said that the curtain in the witness room was closed twice and that media were at some point asked to leave.
Governor Lee has now ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” The state’s final remaining execution of the year will not go ahead as planned.
It is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year. In May, Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, had his execution postponed after staff could not find a vein.
Pike was 18 in 1995 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer at a job training camp for troubled teens in Knoxville. Pike had accused Slemmer of trying to steal her boyfriend. Slemmer was found with an inverted pentagram carved into her chest, though Pike denies carving it. Two other camp residents testified that Pike bragged about the killing and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull. A media frenzy followed, and Pike was sentenced to death in 1996.
In her clemency petition, Pike said she meant to beat Slemmer, not kill her, but could not “put the brakes on.”
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” she said.
Martinez, who made the trip to Tennessee with her husband using funds raised by a victims’ group, told the AP before the execution: “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst.” She also told the Argentine newspaper ClarÃn that she remembers her daughter as a 19-year-old who loved computers, retro video games and the roller rink.
“I am her voice. Someone has to speak for Colleen,” she said.
Since 1976, only 18 women have been executed in the United States, compared with 1,663 men, about 1 percent of all executions.
Tennessee’s final scheduled execution of the year has been called off pending the third-party review.