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.”
At this point, I’d just let her rot.
She is a convicted murderer. Her sentence was death. Her attorney even requested death by hanging but the request was denied.
So be it. But the state has failed to hand down the stipulated punishment. The fact is that her punishment resulted in a different outcome than what was deemed to be just.
Doesn’t matter who it is, doesn’t matter why it happened, doesn’t matter how it happened. This was and is a horrendous miscarriage of justice.
The above are just facts. I’m no judge or lawyer, and I can’t be the one to decide what happens next. However, in my opinion, she is owed something. I don’t know what that something is. But what happened isn’t right and was not her fault.
So while you’d “just let her rot”, it’s my opinion that this would not be in the spirit of a just and competent legal system.
If nothing has worked so far, what more can you do? I’m just being a realist.