A woman prisoner named Christa Gail Pike, 50, has survived after being given two doses of lethal injection during an execution in the US state of Tennessee. After the unprecedented failure on Wednesday night, she was taken unconscious from the prison to hospital by ambulance, her lawyers confirmed.
Experts described the botched process, in what would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than two centuries, as “unprecedented”, the Associated Press reported.
Pike was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 murder of fellow student Colleen Slemmer, when she was just 18. Her execution was due on Wednesday morning, but after a long drama in which an appeals court issued a stay and the Supreme Court later lifted it, she was taken into the execution chamber at 7:27pm.
By 8:26pm she had been given two full doses of the lethal drugs. But long after they were administered she had not died, and could be heard alive and snoring loudly. With the situation deteriorating, the microphone was switched off at 8:53pm and witnesses were taken out.
Immediately afterwards, Pike’s lawyers filed emergency applications with the US Supreme Court and other courts seeking an immediate halt to the execution and an order for life-saving emergency medical care. They said the failed procedure was causing their client unbearable physical suffering, in violation of the US Constitution.
Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said executions have been halted in the past when a vein could not be found, but it is rare for a prisoner to survive after lethal drugs have entered the body. It is the second failed execution in Tennessee this year.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report