Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said on Thursday that Christa Pike’s death sentence is likely to remain in place after she survived a completed lethal injection attempt.
The decision will ultimately be made by the courts, not the governor, unless he chooses to commute her sentence.
“As it related to a particular individual like Christa Pike and her crime, she’s still incarcerated under the laws of the state of Tennessee,” Lee said, according to a report from the New York Post. “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts.”
The comment strongly implies that a commutation is out of the question.
Pike, 50, was scheduled for execution on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.
If the attempt had been successful, Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Execution team members spent nearly an hour and used roughly 10 needles trying to establish IV lines after earlier warnings that Pike had difficult vein access.
Ultimately, Pike received two doses of pentobarbital, remained conscious enough to complain of arm pain, snored audibly, and was later transported to a hospital unconscious and on a ventilator.
