By Jonathan Allen
Oct 7 (Reuters) – A Nashville judge said she would order Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the state’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike last week for a 1995 murder, including the syringes and other tools used in two botched lethal injections.
Pike, 50, was taken to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and with severe arm injuries after two injections of the caustic barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution last Wednesday.
She had regained consciousness and was speaking as of Tuesday and remains shackled to her hospital bed, according to her lawyers, as they seek to pierce the secrecy that normally surrounds execution procedures in Tennessee and other states.
They have said the botched execution, the second this year in Tennessee, amounts to torture in violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on cruel or unusual punishments.
Pike, who was sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, is the first person known to have survived a “completed execution attempt” in the US, her lawyers say.
They asked the judge in Davidson County Chancery Court, I’Ashea Myles, to order Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints.
Myles largely sided with Pike’s lawyers at the end of Wednesday’s hearing, describing the litigation, which began in January in an effort to prevent the scheduled execution, as unusual because no one had anticipated Pike surviving.
“This case is unique, to say the least,” Myles said.
She also ordered the state to preserve internal communications about the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.
She has yet to rule on a request by Pike’s lawyers that the Tennessee Department of Correction let them take any residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has opposed what it says is a “duplicative and unnecessary” preservation order, arguing it is already legally required to preserve all evidence.
Tennessee and other US states have long struggled to acquire execution drugs. They cannot be obtained from major pharmaceutical companies because of a European trade ban on companies that sell products for use in torture or executions.
Tennessee, like other states, has turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to make small batches of the drugs, promising to hide their identity.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who denied Pike’s clemency request to commute her sentence to life in prison, has called the botched execution a tragedy. He has suspended executions for the rest of the year and promised an investigation.
Pike’s lawyers had sought an alternative to lethal injections, saying their warnings had been ignored that her small veins and related medical conditions would risk something going wrong.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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