In an uprecedented event, a death row convict in Tennessee survived two dosages of a lethal drug on Wednesday. Christa Gail Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison.
Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18.An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay.
Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital. The state's execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered "if the inmate is not deceased" after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set. Seven other people have survived medical problems due to the execution team's failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, officials added.
