Tennessee Can’t Execute Christa Pike After 2 Lethal Injections: What Happens Next Under Tennessee Law? | Today’s news
The botched execution of Christy Pike sent shockwaves through the legal system of Tennessee and the United States as a whole.
While officials have yet to explain what went wrong during the botched execution, Gov. Bill Lee ordered a review of the situation and indefinitely postponed both Pike’s execution and another execution scheduled for this year.
The pike’s condition remained unknown Thursday. At one point during the attempted execution on Wednesday night, she asked prison officials if her arm should feel a certain way, Reuters reported.
However, it was not clear if this happened after the first dose was administered, as officials do not share that information.
More than an hour after the trial began and about 30 minutes after she was injected with a backup dose of pentobarbital, Pike could be heard snoring loudly.
What the law says
According to the Tennessee Code, the method of execution of a person sentenced to death must always be by lethal injection unless “lethal injection is found unconstitutional by a court of competent jurisdiction” or “the Commissioner of Corrections certifies to the Governor that the department is unable to execute a sentence of death by lethal injection, despite reasonable efforts to do so.”
An alternative method in these cases is electrocution according to the Code.
However, this does not mean that authorities can automatically choose to change methods after any failed implementation. The legal question that could be litigated in this case is whether this failed attempt qualifies as an inability to perform a lethal injection and what the procedure must be.
What the governor said
The Governor of Tennessee has broad clemency authority, which includes powers to grant reprieves, commutations, or post-conviction pardons.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee decided to order a review and indefinitely delay the execution, along with another one that had been scheduled for this year.
“There are very few answers this morning. It’s very early,” Lee told reporters Thursday at an unrelated event, saying he had not received any updates on Pike’s condition. “The people of our state deserve answers to these questions.”
He said prison staff were taking action and what happened was “deeply concerning”.
Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning for the murder committed when she was 18. It would be the first execution in Tennessee in more than a couple of centuries. An appeals court stayed the execution an hour before it was to begin, but the US Supreme Court overturned the stay hours later.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections said in a statement that it “followed every step of the state’s statutory and established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s office.”
