Tennessee prison chief resigns after botched lethal injection of killer Christa Pike
As of Thursday evening, Ms. Pike remained unconscious and on a ventilator after surviving two fatal does of the lethal injection
Tennessee's prison chief has resigned days after overseeing the botched prison execution of Christa Pike - where as many as seven needles were used to apply the lethal injection.
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Christa Pike, 50, was due to be executed by the state for murdering Colleen Slemmer after being sentenced to death in 1996.
She is in a critical condition after surviving two botched lethal injections - despite being left 'audibly snoring' after the failed execution in Tennessee.
Reports have said that as many as seven needles were used to apply the lethal injection, including one which bent while being removed from her arm.
As of Thursday evening, Ms. Pike remained unconscious and on a ventilator.
Tennessee's prison chief, Frank Strada, has resigned after overseeing the botched excecution, Governor Bill Lee said on Saturday.
Mr Lee has paused all future executions and ordered an independent review into the botched attempt on Ms Pike.
Read More: Who is Christa Pike? Tennessee death row killer in hospital
“I appreciate his willingness to put the interests of Tennesseans first during this difficult moment,” Mr. Lee said in a statement.
“I have accepted his decision to step down and am grateful for his commitment to ensuring a smooth leadership transition.”
Pike was set to be the first woman to be executed in the US state for more than 200 years for stabbing and beating a classmate three decades ago in 1995.
Mr Strada maintained that he believed the department had followed the lethal injection protocol and assured he said he would cooperate with the investigation.
“I look forward to doing everything I can to help determine exactly what occurred,” Mr. Strada said.
Despite two attempts at administering a lethal injection, the convicted murderer was "audibly snoring" in the death chamber, a journalist who witnessed her failed execution attempt has told LBC.
Her lawyers are now asking for her sentence to be commuted.
She was injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday but remained alive, her lawyers said. She was then sent to hospital in an ambulance.
Tori Gessner, a reporter at Nashville news website WKRN who has witnessed five executions, told Tonight With Andrew Marr that Ms Pike was still "talking and singing" after the first execution attempt.
Ms Gessner said she was unsure whether the 50-year-old knew what was going on when executioners tried to kill her for a second time.
"She did mention a couple things," she told Tonight With Andrew Marr. "She asked if this was supposed to happen this way during the first round of the pentobarbital going into her system?
"And she mentioned her arm burning, but it seemed to me like she was sleeping. That's what it looked like, at least with the snoring. And you could still see her, her chest rising and falling as if she was breathing."
She said the first execution attempt appeared to be going "smoothly" until the curtains "all of a sudden closed" while Ms Pike was "clearly still breathing".
"They reopened. They try the process all over again, which is extremely unusual. That didn't work.
"They closed the curtains at 8:05 PM. So we're sitting in this room for hours, and then we continue to hear her snoring until almost 9 PM and are escorted out."
She said she knew something wasn't right after 30 minutes had passed following the administration of the injection.
"Typically, once the drugs start going into the system, it takes maybe 20 to 30 minutes for them to pronounce the time of death.
"Once that period passed, I looked to my right at another media witness who I had witnessed executions with in the past, and we were both thinking something is wrong.
"She was still talking, still singing....we knew something was off."
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has ordered a suspension of the death penalty in Tennessee for the rest of the year after Wednesday's failed attempt.
Ms Gessner said that the botched execution was "starting a conversation" around the death penalty in the state.
"Back in May, Tennessee had another what some people call botched execution where the medical team couldn't even find the inmate's vein.
"They tried a central line, couldn't get that. There was some controversy with the doctor there. Apparently, the same doctor was working on the Christa Pike execution. We don't know what went awry there, but there are a lot of questions."
She added that Tennessee had "just rewritten their entire death penalty protocol.
"They spent years doing that after some controversy years prior with them not testing the drugs. So it's definitely raising a lot of questions and concerns."
Pike, 50, was set to be the first woman to be executed in the US state for more than 200 years for stabbing and beating a classmate three decades ago in 1995.
But her lawyers say after two syringes of pentobarbital were administered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, she still has a heartbeat and was even snoring
She is now recovering in hospital, authorities added.
Experts have described the incident as "unparalleled".
Pike's legal team said : "Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution."We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy."
In a statement, the Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed "every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office,
"The lethal injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, and the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening. Christa Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility," the statement concluded.
There had been a last-minute legal challenge to try to stop the execution but in the end the Supreme Court ruled it should go ahead.
Pike, 50, whose clemency petition highlighting childhood trauma and sexual abuse was denied by Governor Bill Lee on Monday.
She would be the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.
Pike was 18 in 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend and a third companion lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at their Knoxville Job Corps vocational center, into a wooded area where they tortured and killed her.
The gruesome nature of the murder, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim's chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir, drew intense media coverage at the time.
Trial testimony indicated that Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for the affections of her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted the following year of first-degree murder.
Because Shipp was 17 at the time of Ms Slemmer's murder, jurors could not consider the death penalty, and he received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, appeared as a witness for the prosecution and received probation.
Currently the only woman on the southern state's death row, Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.
In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute her death sentence to a life sentence without the possibility of parole, her lawyers documented her history as a childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17.
They also cited the diagnoses she received in prison for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her lawyers also pointed to evidence that Pike's mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for their client to control her impulses as a young person.
"The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists," her lawyers wrote in response to Lee's denial of clemency.
"Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women."
Ms Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, has spoken out in support of the execution.
Executions of female prison inmates are exceedingly rare in the US, with women accounting for just 18 of the 1,683 people put to death since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Before Wednesday, Tennessee had executed 17 people.Pike's case has drawn international attention, with a group of United Nations human rights experts issuing a recent statement calling for commutation of her death sentence.