NASHVILLE — Christa Pike was strapped to a gurney on September 30 and given two doses of pentobarbital. She survived. A week later, a Tennessee judge has ordered the state to keep every syringe, log book and message connected to what happened in that room.
Chancellor I’Ashea Myles of the Davidson County Chancery Court granted an emergency motion from Pike’s lawyers on Wednesday, directing the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all evidence from the failed lethal injection. “Anything in the actual room needs to be preserved and maintained,” Myles said, NPR reported.
The order covers drugs, syringes, IV lines, needles, restraints and the gurney, along with photographs, video and audio recordings, observation logs and electrocardiogram readouts. It also covers communications about the decision to call emergency medical services and the decision to stop the second attempt. Myles told the state that if any evidence had already been discarded or deleted, officials should take steps to “claw back” what they can, ABC News reported.
The state argued the order was unnecessary. Assistant Attorney General Will Ayers told the court that physical evidence was collected from the execution chamber on the night of September 30 and logged into a preservation room under an existing federal order. The state also said parts of the IV lines were cut and may have stayed attached to Pike when she was taken to hospital, leaving some evidence in the hospital’s hands.
Luke Ihnen, an assistant federal defender in Knoxville, called the ruling “just a first step of many” to enforce Pike’s constitutional rights. “We don’t know what they have because they won’t tell us,” he told reporters. Her lawyers say she was on life support for six days, has pneumonia and has lost function in her arms. She is now conscious and speaking, they said.
The Death Penalty Information Center says Pike is the first person in the history of US capital punishment to survive injection with lethal drugs. Tennessee has not explained what went wrong. Governor Bill Lee halted executions through the end of the year and ordered an independent review, and Correction Commissioner Frank Strada has resigned.
The failure adds to a troubled record. In August, the physician who declared Hines dead had overseen an earlier botched execution, and Tennessee joined Alabama and Oklahoma in the first same-day triple execution since 2010. Florida carried out a double execution weeks earlier.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. There is no execution order pending against her, a state attorney said, but he could not rule out seeking one. Her lawyers have called for her death sentence to be commuted.
