US Female Death Row Inmate Survives Two Lethal Injection Attempts: 'First Time This Has Happened'

A female death row inmate in the United States, sentenced to death for a murder committed 31 years ago, has survived after receiving two doses of lethal injection during her execution.

According to the British daily Guardian and other media on the 30th, Christa Pike, 50, who was sentenced to death for murder in 1995, survived after being administered execution drugs twice at a prison in Nashville, Tennessee, and was subsequently transferred to a hospital.

Journalists who witnessed the execution told local media that Pike was clearly alive even after the drug administration, and that they heard her snoring 40 minutes after the injection.

Pike's attorneys argued that the execution process had effectively turned into a process inflicting "extreme pain," and filed an emergency application with the Tennessee Supreme Court to halt the execution.

They claimed that Pike had to endure unnecessary pain during the execution process, which violates the constitutional amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed Pike's survival in a subsequent statement, stating that the state government attempted the execution in accordance with procedures.

Tennessee state regulations dictate that if an inmate does not die after the first drug is administered during an execution, a second drug is to be administered, but the guidelines do not specify further instructions if the inmate survives even after the second administration.

The Tennessee Death Penalty Information Center told the Associated Press that while there were seven past instances where inmates survived because the execution team failed to find a vein for the lethal injection, there had never been a case where an inmate who actually received the drugs survived.

Had Pike's execution proceeded as planned, she would have been the first female inmate actually executed in Tennessee in about 200 years.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said in a statement that he has ordered a comprehensive third-party investigation to figure out what happened and announced that he will suspend additional executions scheduled for this year.

Pike was sentenced to death for murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer along with her boyfriend in 1995 when she was 18 years old.

Investigations showed that Pike and her boyfriend lured Slemmer to a wooded area, attacked her with a weapon, and beat her to death with rocks and other objects.

The case drew significant attention in American society at the time after it was revealed that a pentagram, considered a symbol associated with "satanic worship," was carved into the victim's body.

During her approximately 30 years of imprisonment since then, Pike has petitioned for a commuted sentence, citing that she suffered childhood sexual abuse.

Pike claimed in her petition, "I was an 18-year-old kid suffering from mental illness. It took me years just to realize how serious what I did was."

Just an hour before the execution, a U.S. appeals court stayed the execution, stating that the claim of sexual abuse raised by Pike needed to be reviewed to see if it was sufficiently considered at the time of sentencing, but the execution procedures resumed a few hours later when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.