Execution Fails

Tennessee officials tried to execute death row inmate Christa Pike on Wednesday night. They couldn't finish. Two doses of pentobarbital left her alive and snoring, her lawyers said.

Guards walked witnesses out of the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Pike, 50, was rushed by ambulance to a hospital afterward, BBC News and NPR reported. One of her attorneys told BBC News she was "being provided life-saving measures." Witnesses heard her snoring loudly after the two doses. Then guards led them out, NPR reported.

A court sentenced Pike to death in 1996 for killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer the year before. At 18, she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer into a wooded area near a Knoxville job training campus and killed her, the Guardian reported. The ages of those involved and the brutality of the killing drew national attention.

Tennessee hadn't executed a woman in more than 200 years. Not once. Pike would have been the first, NPR and the Guardian reported.

Gov. Bill Lee ordered a third-party review of what happened. He added that the state's other scheduled execution will not go forward this year. "Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State's most serious responsibilities," Lee said in a statement carried by NPR and ABC News. Tennessee's Department of Correction maintained it followed lawful protocol. "The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective," spokesperson Dorinda Carter told the Tennessean, according to BBC News.

Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, Pike's attorneys, blamed "difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital" and a lack of emergency medical care for the failure under what they called a secretive protocol, according to a statement reported by ABC News.

The U.S. Supreme Court had voted 6-3 to let the execution proceed, overturning a stay a federal appeals court granted just hours earlier, ABC News reported. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warning the majority had cleared the way to execute Pike before her appeals could be fully heard, according to the Guardian.

Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center called Pike's survival "singular and unparalleled." Seven other inmates have survived botched attempts to find a vein, she told NPR, but none lived after the drugs were actually administered.

May Martinez, Slemmer's mother, told the Associated Press before the execution that she still pictures her daughter "feeling that pain and trying to get up and run."