Tennessee execution team members failed multiple times to establish working IV lines in Christa Pike's arms before her attempted execution and warned that some of her veins may have ruptured, or "blown," before she was injected with the lethal drug, her attorney wrote in a court document filed Thursday.
The IV team went through about 10 needles and tried several IV sites on both arms, attorney Randy Spivey wrote in the document, which provides the most detailed account of the execution attempt so far. They even struggled to push saline through the last IV site they established, Spivey wrote.
Pike, 50, was hospitalized after surviving two doses of pentobarbital as the state tried to execute her on Sept. 30 for the 1995 stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. She was 18 when she tortured and killed Slemmer with her boyfriend, becoming one of the youngest women to be sentenced to death.
State protocol calls for a second dose of pentobarbital if the first doesn’t result in death, but it doesn’t spell out what to do if a person survives the second injection.
After being taken to a hospital, Pike was on a ventilator for several days. At one point, her attorneys did not expect her to survive. She ultimately regained consciousness and returned to prison after being discharged.
The failed execution has brought renewed scrutiny to how Tennessee carries out death sentences. The court document was part of a separate legal proceeding in which people on the state's death row are challenging Tennessee's lethal injection procedures.
"Our predictions about the likelihood of botched executions have come true — and will continue to come true — without substantial change,” Kit Thomas, an attorney representing people on death row in the case, said.
Nearly an hour of IV attempts
The execution team began trying to place the two IVs required by Tennessee’s execution protocols at 6:34 p.m., Spivey wrote, and when they struggled Pike helped, advising them to look in her upper arm for a viable vein.
They managed to set an IV in Pike’s right arm within about 6 minutes, but it took them nearly an hour to complete the same process in her left arm.
Pike was “wincing and grimacing” as the IV team members moved the needles around inside her left arm, Spivey wrote, and the team members repeatedly expressed doubts after inserting the needles.
One team member said a vein “might be blowing” at 6:57 p.m. while examining an IV in Pike's left arm, but two others said they couldn’t tell, Spivey wrote. “One of them said something like, ‘it’s either blood or blown, I need to know,'” Spivey wrote.
The team tried again with a different spot in her left arm, and the needle appeared to be severely bent when they pulled it out, the attorney said. “I think it's blown,” the attorney recalled one of the IV team members saying at 7:07 p.m. After more attempts, the team decided at 7:13 p.m. that they had successfully placed an IV in Pike's left arm, and they taped her hands down and hooked her up to a heart monitor.
Pike complained of burning arm pain
A series of phone calls were made to the execution chamber starting about five minutes later. Spivey said it appeared the execution team members responsible for pushing the pentobarbital into the lines — a process that happens in an adjoining room — were asking the IV team for repeated checks of Pike's left arm.
It’s not clear exactly when the pentobarbital was pushed into the IV lines, but at 7:34 p.m., Pike said her arm was hurting.
“I feel like my arm is about to bust. It burns,” she said, according to her attorney. She continued to talk to her spiritual adviser for the next 10 minutes before she began making an “agitated snoring sound,” Spivey wrote.
Over the next 30 minutes Pike strained, flinched, moved her head and seemed to struggle to breathe, Spivey said, and when he asked to use a phone he was led on a circuitous, seven-minute route through the facility instead of being allowed to use the phone in the execution witness room.
Spivey called fellow attorneys at 8:22 p.m. and asked them to stop the execution because a third dose of pentobarbital isn’t authorized under the state’s protocol. He then went back to the witness room and told the deputy attorney general that Pike needed immediate medical care.
Spivey was told an ambulance was on the way at 8:50 p.m., and 20 minutes later he was told that medical staff were providing life-saving measures, he wrote. An ambulance was seen arriving at the hospital at 9:14 p.m.