Inside the Christa Pike botched execution: a witness speaks

A Tennessee journalist who sat in the execution chamber when Christa Pike's lethal injection went wrong has described what he saw and heard during more than two hours of an execution that never reached its conclusion.

Will Pucket, an anchor and reporter for WVLT in Knoxville, was one of seven media witnesses in the room. Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer. She survived the procedure and is now conscious and talking in hospital while her lawyers fight to have her sentence commuted.

The execution had been scheduled for 10am Central time in Nashville, a week before the interview. A higher court briefly stayed the sentence, and the process did not begin until just before 7pm. Pucket said a procedure that should take about 30 minutes from the moment witnesses were seated instead stretched past two hours.

It was the first execution Pucket had witnessed in nearly a decade in the job. His six colleagues in the room had seen far more, he estimated about 30 each. About 20 to 25 minutes into what should have been a 10-minute preparation window, the witnesses had still seen and heard nothing. One of the veteran reporters leaned over and told him it should not be taking this long.

Pucket said the standard sequence is that the curtains to the viewing area are opened and a microphone switched on once the needles are placed, roughly 10 minutes in. The inmate is asked for a final statement and then, over the next 15 to 18 minutes or so, falls silent and dies.

That is not what happened. Pike, who is Buddhist, had a spiritual adviser with her. The two sang songs, and at points she laughed. At times she lifted herself up to look at the needle in her arm, something Pucket was told should not happen. For roughly an hour and a half she kept singing and talking. When the second dose of pentobarbital began, she started to make a noise Pucket described as snoring. Others, he noted, might call it choking or a death rattle.

The curtain was then lowered. Witnesses could still hear activity in the chamber but could no longer see it. Just before 9pm, the warden asked all witnesses to leave, and they were told they were free to go.

Pucket said he did not have a baseline to judge how distressing the experience should have been, though in hindsight he believes it probably should have been. Reports say Pike's veins collapsed and the drugs went into surrounding tissue rather than her bloodstream, which is why the procedure was halted.

Members of the victim's family were watching from another room. They told WVLT they had expected to see justice served that day. Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, returned to Florida without that outcome and has since been critical of the State of Tennessee in interviews with other stations.

Pike's legal team has called the situation medically unprecedented. Her lawyers said two nights before the interview that they expected her to become brain dead and were preparing for her to be taken off life support. She has since been reported as conscious and speaking, with serious damage to her arms where the drugs entered the muscle. Whether she faces another execution attempt is now the central question in a fierce US debate over lethal injection.