Christa Pike feared lethal injection would fail in chilling audio recorded before botched execution
Death row inmate Christa Pike expressed her fears about the potential for the lethal injection to fail before Tennessee botched her execution.
Pike spoke of another death row inmate Tony Carruthers, who also had his execution cancelled after officials failed to establish an IV line – in audio obtained by the New York Times.
She said in the recording: “The concerns I have on our lethal injection method are simply that I do not have good veins, and I’m worried about our physician not being qualified to start a central line on me."
She added, “If that happens because — he wasn’t able to on Tony Carruthers. Tony Carruthers lived out my worst nightmare. Detail for detail.”
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Pike also mentioned she was aware the drug used in the injection “burns very bad.”
“And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Drano in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me,” Pike is understood to have said in the recording shared by her lawyers with the publication.
One of her lawyers Stephen Ferrell told CNN Pike is now on a ventilator and ‘may never recover.’
She was given two doses of the drug pentobarbital, which shuts down breathing and heart functions – but she survived.
According to witnesses of her execution, Pike could be heard whimpering, crying and breathing loudly, reported PEOPLE.
During the process, she is reported to have said ‘My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.’
According to her lawyers, her arms were ‘swollen, burned and blistered’ following the execution attempt.
She has remained unconscious in a critical condition while under guard in a hospital, her lawyers say.
Since then, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered a halt to executions in the state for the rest of the year and Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is expected to resign his position in several weeks, reported The Associated Press.
Pike was just 18 years old when she tortured and murdered her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
Pike carried out the killing alongside her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part. She was sentenced to death and spent the last three decades on death row.
If her execution were to have been successful, she would have been the first female to have been executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.
Michael D. Carroll