The failed execution attempt of a woman in Tennessee on Wednesday wasn’t the first time this has happened. The state’s execution protocols have been under scrutiny for years.
Transcript
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
This woman, Christa Pike, remains in the hospital after the state of Tennessee tried and failed to execute her yesterday. That execution attempt is the latest in a string of botched executions in that state and across the country. And one of our investigative correspondents here at NPR, Chiara Eisner, has been covering executions for years. She’s with me now in the studio to talk about more. Chiara, when I heard this this morning, my first thought was, what kind of medical condition is a woman in who has survived two doses of a lethal injection? Do we know how she’s doing?
CHIARA EISNER, BYLINE: What we know is that, in a call to reporters today, her attorney said they haven’t been allowed much contact with her. But they did say there’s blistering and burning on her arm, and she’s receiving medical care. This is, again, after the state administered one dose of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, and she was still talking and breathing. Then the state gave her the second dose an hour later, and Pike was still alive. And as we just heard, reporters could hear her snoring after that second dose.
PFEIFFER: How unusual is it that someone survives an execution?
EISNER: Well, this is the first time that we know of that someone survives two doses of pentobarbital, but it’s hardly the first time an execution doesn’t go according to plan. This is part of a much larger pattern. Something similar happened in Tennessee just this past May, when the state tried to execute prisoner Tony Carruthers. Maria DeLiberato, his lawyer, was behind the curtain with her client as execution workers repeatedly tried and failed again to place needles in his arms, feet and chest.
MARIA DELIBERATO: Tony was in agony, moaning in guttural pain. There was blood. It took close to an hour. And eventually, they called off the execution.
EISNER: Just like Pike, Carruthers is also still alive today. Back in 2022, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered an investigation that showed that his state repeatedly failed to follow its own protocols again and again and temporarily paused executions. He paused executions again last night, too.
And it’s not just Tennessee. States across the country have investigated their own lethal injection protocols. And so has the federal government. After former President Biden paused executions during his presidency, the Department of Justice released a report that said executions should not be performed by lethal injection anymore because there was just too much risk of the procedure causing pain and suffering. There was too much room for error.
PFEIFFER: So, Chiara, based on your reporting, why do these mistakes keep happening?
EISNER: Well, one reason is the drugs themselves. All major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. have refused to make their drugs available to prisons for executions. That means prisoners (ph) have a hard time sourcing the drugs. Some have turned to smaller pharmacies that don’t always have the highest standards. I reported two years ago that Texas obtained some of their pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy with a history of more than a dozen safety and cleanliness violations. Then you have the question of the quality of the drug after it’s been made. States have been shown to have used drugs past their expiration date, and they’ve even used the wrong drug on someone.
PFEIFFER: You mentioned, in a previous case, some workers had trouble inserting the needles. So are there – are these staff medically qualified? Is the staffing partly an issue?
EISNER: States like to keep that kind of information secret. They say that’s to protect the privacy of their staff. But multiple lawsuits have been filed across the country, including in Tennessee, that say the states owe more information about the execution team’s qualifications to the person being executed and to the public. But we know from previous botched executions that staff often fail to correctly administer the drugs. Pike’s lawyers said in a briefing today that unqualified personnel stuck her multiple times, and that should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and torture.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR’s Chiara Eisner. Thanks for covering this.
EISNER: Thanks, Sacha.
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