Photo credit: Reuters
After the execution for the murder of Christy Pike in Tennessee last month did not go to plan, confusion arose amongst prison staff and emergency services dispatchers, which led to a delay in her receiving medical assistance. This is evident from recordings of emergency calls.
Pike, together with her then-boyfriend, killed Collin Slammer in 1995, and on 30 September she was administered two doses of the lethal injection.
When it became clear that she would not die from the dose administered, she was taken to hospital.
The confusion arose partly due to apparent inconsistencies between prison staff, according to the AP, which was the first to obtain the audio recordings of the emergency calls.
This likely led to a delay in providing medical assistance to Pike.
The BBC has contacted the state’s Department of Corrections for comment.
The department has not yet stated what, in its view, went wrong during the attempt to execute Pike.
Paike’s legal team attributes this to the fact that the drug phenobarbital, which was administered to her, likely spread under her skin rather than entering her bloodstream in sufficient quantities to cause death.
Pike has now been discharged from hospital, although in the latest update on her condition her lawyers warned that she faces a ‘long road to recovery’.
It is not yet clear what treatment, if any, she is receiving following her return to prison.
What will happen to her next remains unclear, as she is believed to be the only person to have survived an attempted execution by lethal injection.
The mother of the murdered Colline Slammer, who was among those seeking Pike’s execution, described the botched execution as a ‘mess’.
Pike’s boyfriend at the time of the murder, Tadaril Shipp, remains in prison, having escaped the death penalty because he was not yet of legal age when the crime was committed.
The American media have reconstructed the sequence of events on the evening of 30 September using recordings and transcripts of emergency calls.
These materials were published in full by the Nashville Banner.
The first call from Riverbend Prison, which reportedly came in at 20:40 local time, was initially dismissed as a hoax by the emergency services, as the caller was unable to verify his identity using a code.
It appears that this man was in the section of the prison where the injections were being administered.
She said:
“We were carrying out an execution this evening. We administered 10 grams of phenobarbital. The man has not died yet. This started about an hour ago. And we’re calling an ambulance.”
The Nashville Emergency Communications Department has released recordings of its conversations with other local agencies whilst attempting to verify that the call was genuine.
The situation appears to have been further complicated by other prison staff at the facility’s central control centre, who at 21:07 stated that they were the ones who ‘were supposed to make the call’ and that they ‘had not made that call’.
It was not until around 9.11 pm that prison officials confirmed that the original call, made approximately half an hour earlier, was genuine.
After that, the rescue workers were allowed through the prison gates.
A later call included an admission that the situation had been chaotic.
At 21:34, as Pike was being taken to hospital, one of the paramedics asked a colleague to make sure the prison knew exactly where she was being taken, “simply because there had been a lot of other confusion before”.
Photo courtesy of Family Handout
Pike’s lawyers have not yet commented on these records.
Over the past week, her team has regularly updated information on Pike’s condition, describing how she relearned how to walk and speak before she was eventually discharged from hospital.
It is unclear whether the state will attempt to execute Pike again, or when this might happen.
Republicans in some states have called for the new method of execution to be tested.
Meanwhile, Pike’s legal team is urging Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Lee has suspended executions in the state until the end of the year.
An investigation into exactly what went wrong during Pike’s execution is ongoing.
The head of the state’s Department of Corrections has resigned following the botched execution.