NASHVILLE, Tennessee: Tennessee’s execution protocol is a careful document. It tells you how much pentobarbital to give, in what order, and when to stop. What it does not tell you is what to do if the person is still snoring. On Wednesday night that omission became the whole story.
Christa Gail Pike, 50, was to have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than two centuries, and the only woman on the state’s death row. A federal appeals court stayed the execution that morning. The Supreme Court lifted the stay in the evening, the three liberal justices dissenting, and the Department of Correction raced a midnight warrant. Bureaucracy can move very fast when the alternative is paperwork. Chemistry, it turned out, cannot be hurried by a court order.
Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of classmate Colleen Slemmer, received both syringes the protocol allows. Witnesses said she stayed awake, raised her head and asked whether her arm was supposed to feel like that, then settled into loud snoring. Her lawyers filed while the procedure was still under way: she had not lost consciousness, her heart was still beating, and the state was now inflicting cruel and unusual punishment by failing to finish. The protocol, having been followed to the letter, had run out of letters.
The department’s statement was a small classic of institutional calm. Every step of the lawful protocol, approved by the Attorney General, had been observed. The chemical had “consistently been effective.” And the protocol “does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out this evening.” In plain speech: the state may kill you twice. It may not kill you a third time. After that, the rule book ends and the ambulance begins.
So they called one. Pike was taken to an off-site hospital and, her lawyers said, placed on life-saving measures. A government that had spent the day arguing her life must end was, by nightfall, paying clinicians to make sure it did not. Governor Bill Lee then halted the remaining execution scheduled this year and ordered a third-party review, the modern method of admitting failure without naming a culprit.
Medical opinion offered to her legal team suggests she may never have reached a blood level sufficient to stop breathing or the heart. Her lawyers had warned of small veins, blown veins and pentobarbital of uncertain quality, under a protocol kept largely secret. They were right, and said they took no pleasure in it. The pleasure belonged to the protocol, which performed exactly as written and produced a living woman.
There is a particular genius in the sequence. The highest court clears the needle. The needle does not work. The protocol forbids another attempt. The ambulance arrives. The governor announces a study. Somewhere in Nashville a form is being revised to cover the contingency that the person scheduled to die is still audibly asleep.
Pike’s last words, before the drugs, were that she was at peace. The protocol was not. It wanted a death before midnight and got a snore, a heartbeat and a hospital bill. For a system that sells lethal injection as the humane, clinical alternative, Wednesday was an awkward advertisement: two doses, full compliance, zero result, and a hurried transfer to the only people in the building whose job was to keep her alive.
The review will ask what went wrong. The shorter answer is already in the witness accounts and the department’s own sentence. They followed the protocol. She did not die. The protocol had nothing else to say, so Tennessee did what an embarrassed institution does when the machine fails in public. It called for help, closed the curtain, and promised to look into the instructions.
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