The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.
They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”
Everything I have read says that she wanted another method of execution because strapping her to a guerney will trigger a PTSD episode.
That, yes. But also she has a blood clotting condition that her and her lawyers believed would make the injections fail to work correctly.
And we can see that’s what happened. Whether it’s because of the blood clots or not, I can’t say. But it sounds like they were spot on.