By Jonathan Allen
Oct 7 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Christa Pike will ask a judge on Wednesday to order prison officials to let them inspect the syringes and other equipment used in Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her last week for a 1995 murder.
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 are asking a judge in Davidson County Chancery Court 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.
They also seek “immediate access to Ms. Pike to independently document her condition” and ask that the Tennessee Department of Correction let them take any residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.
The Tennessee Department of Correction opposes what it says is a “duplicative and unnecessary” preservation order, telling the judge, Chancellor I’Ashea Myles, 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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