Tennessee woman Christa Pike ‘heard snoring’ after surviving two lethal injections, rushed to hospital for life-saving treatment

Christa Pike was supposed to die yesterday. The 50-year-old Tennessee woman’s execution for a murder she committed at age 18 was set for Wednesday morning, and would have made her the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.

In the last moments before she was taken from her cell there was a flurry of dramatic legal activity. First, an appeals court stayed the execution just an hour before it was due to start. Then, hours later, the US Supreme Court stepped in to overturn that stay. And so Pike was taken to face what she assumed would be her death at the hands of a squad of all-female executioners.

The executioner administered two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbitol and waited. But around 40 minutes later, media witnesses say she began snoring. She was then rushed to hospital in an ambulance, where her attorneys say she’s receiving life-saving treatment.

“It appears this did not go how this was supposed to go”

The Tennessee Department of ​Correction has underlined that this was not what was meant to happen and said that they didn’t have any “protocol” in place for this. As per The Guardian: “The lethal ⁠injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, ​and ​the protocol does ​not allow for additional procedures beyond what ​was carried ‌out this ​evening. Christa ​Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility.” 

Investigative journalist John North of WBIR, who was present for the failed execution, put it plainly: “It appears this did not go how this was supposed to go. … when we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive.”

So, now that Pike has technically been executed, is she off the hook? If she’d been born hundreds of years ago, maybe. In Scotland in 1724, Margaret Dickson survived hanging, and as the law said that her sentence had been fulfilled once she’d been hanged, she was set free. She remarried and became known as Margaret “Half-Hanged” Dickson.

Unfortunately for Pike, she is not in Scotland in the 18th century. In the United States, the 1947 Supreme Court case of Francis v. Resweber – brought after the botched attempted execution by electric chair of Willie Francis – ruled that a second execution attempt after a failed first one doesn’t violate the Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy or cruel and unusual punishment.

So, as per the Supreme Court, once Pike has received appropriate medical treatment and has recovered sufficiently, the law is clear that the state then has another chance to kill her.