The only woman on Tennessee ‘dєatᩚh row’ is in hospital after two injections failed to 𝘬iᩚll her.

This handout picture dated January 12, 2023 provided by the Tennessee Department of Correction, shows convicted American murderer Christa Pike [File: AFP]

Two doses of a lethal injection drug have failed to 𝘬iᩚll Christa Gail Pike, a 50-year-old woman who was due to be executed on Wednesday. Pike was taken to hospital after it was found that her heart was still beating following the procedure.

Pike’s lawyers told reporters on Thursday that she is critically ill and receiving “life-saving medical care” in a Nashville hospital.

“Christa is alive right now,” Randall Spivey, one of Pike’s lawyers who attended the execution attempt, said. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now.”

Her lawyers have repeated their calls for Pike’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison after she endured what they called “chemical torture”.

Pike would have been the first woman in more than 200 years to be put to dєatᩚh in Tennessee and was the only woman on the state’s dєatᩚh row. Her attempted execution with doses of the sedative pentobarbital went ahead despite a last-minute stay by a federal appeals court on Wednesday, which was overturned just an hour before her execution by the Supreme Court.

Human rights experts said the botched execution illustrates why the dєatᩚh penalty is inhumane and should be abolished.

Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has represented many American dєatᩚh row inmates as well as detainees held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre, told Al Jazeera: “I’ve been in the execution chamber with six of my clients and it’s never the clinical process they’d have you believe. And it’s always a desperate midnight struggle to stop it.”

He added: “In the end, you have to question whether this makes the world a better, more civilised place. Why, indeed, do we 𝘬iᩚll people to prove that 𝘬iᩚlling people is wrong?”

Ahead of the planned execution, Morris Tidball-Binz, the UN special rapporteur on arbitrary executions, told the UK’s Times newspaper: “If executed, Christa Pike would be a victim of torture to dєatᩚh. This will be a gross violation of human rights.”

Tennessee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while it investigates the incident.

What is the case against Pike?

Pike was found guilty of the murder of another young woman she had viewed as a romantic rival, when she was aged 18, more than 30 years ago.

In January 1995, Pike, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson lured Colleen Slemmer, 19, into a wooded area and tortured and killed her. All four were students at a Job Corps vocational centre in Knoxville.

The case attracted huge public interest, especially after it was revealed that the attackers had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, which Shipp later admitted to doing. Pike, who delivered the 𝘬iᩚlling blow to the victim’s head, smashing her skull, kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull afterwards.

Pike and Shipp confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder in 1996. Pike was sentenced to dєatᩚh; Shipp, who was 17 at the time and therefore ineligible for the dєatᩚh penalty, received life with the possibility of parole.

Her case is highly unusual in that she is a woman and was a teenager when she carried out the murder. Other dєatᩚh row inmates who were convicted at the age of 18 – all men – have had their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.

“Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions,” her lawyers wrote. They also argued that Pike had been the victim of appalling childhood 𝘢bu𝘴e – including two rapes when she was aged 11 and 17.

Stafford Smith told Al Jazeera: “Very few women are executed, but fewer still in Tennessee – it has been 200 years. So, this is a step back to about 1820. Christa was just a teenager, and had undergone horrendous 𝘢bu𝘴e as a child. Now she is 50, a totally different person. It is so pointless – will this really make the world a more civilised place?”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, however, has spoken out in support of the execution.

On Wednesday, a federal court temporarily put the planned execution on hold, on legal and technical grounds. But an hour before the midnight deadline for her execution was to expire, the US Supreme Court overruled the stay on her execution, paving the way for jail authorities to proceed.

Pike had asked to be shot by an all-female firing squad instead of by lethal injection, which she said she feared would be too painful.

Her lawyers had also argued that the injection would be torturous for her as she has “small veins”. This request was denied, however.