Christa Pike, a 50-year-old American woman sentenced to death in the U.S., was taken to a hospital after surviving a lethal injection during an execusion attempt, the BBC reported.
The death row inmate received two doses of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday. Her lawyers said she lost consciousness but remained alive, with a detectable heartbeat, prompting them to seek an emergency halt to the execution and medical treatment.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said officials followed the state’s approved execution protocol. Medical personnel began treating Pike after the failed attempt, and she was later transferred to an off-site medical facility.
Pike’s case has attracted significant attention in the U.S., as she is currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. Executions of women also remain rare in the country.
Pike has been on death row since 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Pike, who was 18 at the time, and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and tortured Slemmer to death in an isolated area near a job-training center for young people in Knoxville.
Pike’s attorneys had sought to stop her execution, arguing, among other things, that the jury that sentenced her to death did not have an adequate opportunity to consider evidence concerning the sexual abuse she experienced during childhood. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, overturned a lower court’s reprieve. Tennessee’s governor had also rejected Pike’s request for clemency.
