Judge orders that Christa Pike execution evidence be preserved

The Davidson County Chancery Court in Nashville ordered Tennessee prison officials to preserve all evidence in connection with last week’s botched lethal injection of Christa Pike, including log books, medical waste and all messages sent or received by officials associated with the execution attempt.

“Anything in the actual room needs to be preserved and maintained,” Judge I’Ashea Myles said.

The judge also granted a request from Pike’s attorneys for “liberal access” to their client, ordering that prison officials will have two hours to respond to requests from lawyers for in-person visits with Pike.

Follow: Execution updates from WPLN 

Speaking outside the courtroom, Luke P. Ihnen, an assistant federal defender in Knoxville, told reporters that this was “just a first step of many to preserve and enforce Christa’s constitutional rights after this unprecedented botched execution.”

The hearing came a week after Pike was left hospitalized and in critical condition following the Sept. 30 execution attempt in which she was strapped to a gurney and administered two doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate widely used in U.S. executions. But several minutes after the first dose, she said her arm was burning and asked whether it was supposed to feel that way. She then said, “Please try up on my shoulder higher.”

Pike’s attorneys said that after days of unconsciousness, Pike was awake again, speaking and continuing to receive critical medical care.

Randy Spivey, a post-conviction attorney representing Pike, called his client “a survivor.”

“She survived sexual abuse [and] the rapes of multiple men. She survived a suicide attempt when she was 12 and she survived the state’s attempt to execute her,” he said. “She deserves answers about what was done to her and the people of Tennessee deserve those answers, too.”

He said of the botched execution, “all of this was foreseen,” because Pike has a medical condition that would make it difficult to insert an IV to deliver the lethal doses of pentobarbital.

Spivey, who was a witness to last week’s failed execution, told NPR that after a second dose, Pike fell unconscious but continued breathing and making sounds like choking. It “went on for so long,” he said.

Following the failed execution, Tennessee’s top prison official, Frank Strada, resigned, and the state’s governor, Bill Lee, halted executions through the end of the year and ordered an independent investigation into the state’s capital punishment system.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether that would affect a second attempt to execute Pike, but speaking at Wednesday’s hearing, Tennessee Assistant Attorney General John Ayers said the decision on when or if to schedule a new execution date was up to the state’s supreme court.

Ihnen, one of the defense attorneys, said it would be “unconscionable that the state would try to execute her again.”

Pike was on death row for a murder she committed at age 18. In 1995, she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow classmate in the Knoxville Job Corps. Shipp, who was a minor at the time of the crime, received life in prison without parole for his part in the murder.

In a clemency petition filed last month, Pike’s attorneys asked that her sentence be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole, citing her history of childhood trauma.

“Local and national media covered Christa’s trial in the midst of the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1990s,” the attorneys said. “In truth, it was Christa’s abusive boyfriend and co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, who was fascinated by satanic imagery.”

The media at the time had “focused on the salacious parts of Christa’s crime, disregarding the context of her youth, trauma, and mental illness,” they added.

Critics of the death penalty are outraged at what happened to Pike during the attempt to execute her.

“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in a statement.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, said Pike was the first person in the history of capital punishment to survive after being injected with lethal drugs.

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