Tennessee woman still alive after attempts to execute her, lawyers say

Christa Pike, a 50-year-old woman, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Tennessee for murdering a schoolmate in 1995 when she was 18 years old. According to The Hill, lawyers for Pike said she was still alive after being administered two syringes of lethal injection drugs, specifically pentobarbital, at 8:26 p.m. local time.

Pike's case had been the subject of dramatic legal wrangling, with a temporary court-ordered pause being granted and then lifted by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Tennessee could proceed with the execution. The Supreme Court's decision, made by a 6-3 conservative majority, allowed the execution to move forward after a three-judge panel of the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals had granted a short stay to consider Pike's claims of childhood trauma and sexual abuse.

Pike's clemency petition was denied by Governor Bill Lee on Monday, and she would have been the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years and the only person in the modern era of US capital punishment to be executed in Tennessee for a crime committed as a teenager.

Brief written by urgent.news from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Maverick, The Hill, Le Monde English — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.