Add the Gazzetta del Sud as a source
Christa Pike, the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee, survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital administered during her execution. The State Department of Corrections confirmed this: the woman was transferred to a medical facility for treatment. After the failed attempt, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to stop the execution.
Almost two hours of procedure
Witnesses, including journalists from several US newspapers, described a procedure that was much longer than expected, lasting from 7pm to 8.56pm local time. Pike remained awake, talking and chanting with her spiritual guide after the drug began, and after the first dose, she continued to move and breathe audibly.
In the place where the execution was scheduled, a maximum security prison in Tennessee, journalists were also present as witnesses. “It seems that not everything went as planned,” reported John North, a reporter for the WBIR broadcaster. “When we left the building, as far as we knew, she was probably still alive,” he added in reference to the condemned woman.
The lawyers: «The State has failed again»
“This evening the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawfully ordered death sentence,” Pike’s lawyers said in a statement. «Christa is hospitalized in a nearby hospital. We have not been informed about his condition”, add the woman’s lawyers.
The 1995 crime and the governor’s no
Pike has been on death row in Tennessee since March 1996. The woman was sentenced to death for the murder, committed in 1995, of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate of hers in the Job Corps vocational training program in Knoxville. Pike was 18 at the time. The crime was linked to a romantic rivalry. Her two accomplices, also teenagers – her boyfriend at the time, 17, and another 18-year-old girl – avoided the death penalty. The first was sentenced to life imprisonment, while the second received a suspended sentence in exchange for her testimony against the other two.
The Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, had rejected requests on Monday to commute Christa Pike’s sentence, despite appeals from numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.
Pike’s execution was expected to be the 30th this year in the United States, 16 of which have occurred in Florida. All were performed by lethal injection.
Hands off Cain: «The capital mistake is capital punishment»
«It is time to end the death penalty, the death penalty and death by punishment. It’s time to disarm the violent arm of the law, bring non-violence into justice.” This is what Hands Off Cain declares when commenting on the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
«The capital mistake is capital punishment – says the association – We don’t want a penal execution that works, but something better than penal execution». “When something doesn’t work in the practice of the death penalty, they call it a ‘botched’ execution, they say that something went ‘wrong’ – adds Hands Off Cain – And the fanatics of capital punishment don’t realize that the mess and the wrong lie in the death penalty itself, in the violence of doing justice». «In the name of the law and of Abel, the state of law becomes a state of wrong and death, the state that kills becomes a Cain-State», he concludes.