After surviving an execution attempt: the battle for the future of death row inmate Christa Pike

The American legal system faces an unprecedented deadlock regarding the continued punishment of Christa Pike, a death row inmate who survived two doses of lethal injection after her execution warrant expired. Pike is hospitalized under guard, on a ventilator and unconscious. Her lawyers argue that any future attempt to resume the procedure would violate the ban on cruel punishment.

The American legal system faces an unprecedented deadlock regarding the continued punishment of Christa Pike, a death row inmate who survived two doses of lethal injection after her original execution warrant officially expired at midnight last Wednesday. Pike remains hospitalized under guard in a Nashville hospital, on a ventilator and unconscious, while medical teams work to flush the overdose of the anesthetic pentobarbital from her body. Her lawyers quickly intervened in court, arguing that any future attempt to resume the execution process violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and demanded that the Tennessee governor commute her sentence to life imprisonment. The central issue that will determine her future focuses on the level of brain damage and cognitive competence that will remain if she regains consciousness. Scott Jones, a senior partner at the law firm Banks & Jones, explained that the necessary step now is a brain activity test, citing a 1986 Supreme Court precedent (Ford v. Wainwright), which states that a person who cannot understand the nature of the punishment cannot be executed. The failure of the procedure led to shock at the top of the Tennessee prison service, with the resignation of the state's prison commissioner, and the governor's decision, Bill Lee, to order an independent investigation of the execution system. Pike has been serving her sentence in isolation for three decades, after being convicted in 1995 of torturing and murdering her course mate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, using a Japanese knife and a block of asphalt following a romantic dispute. At the time of the crime, Pike was only 18 years old—a fact that made her the youngest person sentenced to death in the modern era in the United States, and the only woman awaiting the death penalty in the state of Tennessee.