Consider This from NPR - A botched execution raises questions about death penalty protocols

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, it's Sasha Pfeiffer with a quick note before we start the show. Consider this is committed to helping you navigate a complicated world story by story. Today marks one year since federal funding for public media ended, and your support keeps us going. NPR is proud to continue working for you, with you. It takes all of us to protect the future of public media. Please join the community that makes this work possible at donate.npr.org, and thank you. It's considered this where every day we look deeply at one big news story. Today, the aftermath of a botched execution.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Krista Pike is on death row in Tennessee for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer. Pike was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday night. I will say I've witnessed, I believe, five executions in Tennessee. Nothing about today was normal, typical at all. That's WKRN reporter Tori Gessner, speaking at a press conference, Wednesday night. She was covering the execution, and she says things seemed odd after Pike was given two doses of a lethal injection. The curtains close at first at 746, and she was clearly still alive. She was clearly still breathing and snoring. We could audibly hear that.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Krista Pike was very concerned that this execution would go exactly the way it ended up coming out. That's Stephen Farrell, one of Pike's attorneys speaking during a press conference, She was not seeking to delay her execution. She was seeking to have that execution performed humanely and as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Consider this. Krista Pike survived two doses of a lethal injection. What do we know about what happened and what comes next? From NPR, I'm Sasha Fifer. It's Consider This from NPR. Krista Pike would have been Tennessee's first woman to be executed.

Starting point is 00:02:07 in 200 years. Now, she's in critical condition after a botched execution Wednesday. Catherine Sweeney with WPLN in Nashville was a media witness, and she joins us now to tell us what she witnessed. And please note, this could be a tough conversation to listen to because it's likely to include a detailed description of what happened yesterday. Hi, Catherine. Hi, Sasha. What did you seen here at the prison last night? Well, it started before last night, so I was there as one of the seven media witnesses. We get there at 8.30 in the morning. Usually it's over sometime around 11, but we were there for 13 hours while the Supreme Court went back and forth on whether they would block this execution or not. But we found out around 6 p.m. that we would be viewing this execution.

Starting point is 00:02:54 So we went into the witness bay. That's a cinder block room with a window into the death chamber. We got in there around 645. So there's a curtain over that window. And that's so that we can't see the medical workers placing the IV lines. Their identities are shielded by state law. Usually, that takes 10, 15 minutes. It took 45 because they had such a hard time getting needles into her. So eventually the curtains did open, and she was really lively and talking and singing for a long time. After getting an injection. That's right. She should have started to look sedated, but didn't. They closed the curtain and usually that's when the doctor comes out and calls time of death, but he didn't. So they tried again.

Starting point is 00:03:42 They opened the curtains. They did it all again. And that didn't go really any better. So as this is going on, what is the mood in the room you're in? What are people talking about? Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, everyone's shocked. The protocol does say they can do this twice, but that seems like this absurd.

Starting point is 00:04:03 reality and then it did happen twice and they closed the curtains and never opened them again. And I think that is what led to things getting pretty heated between the media witnesses, including me and the communications director. We didn't know why the curtain was closed. We know the doctor's not in there assessing her for 30 minutes to 45 minutes, which is how long we were sitting there hearing her over the loudspeaker, snoring and breathing raggedly, but we couldn't see her. And I was asking, Are you going to try again? Are you going to resuscitate her? We're just sitting here for so long. What is happening? And we didn't get any answers to this question. No explanation at all from prison officials. No. So how did this resolve? For you at least? For us at least, the warden came over the loudspeaker after, I mean, you know, two hours of trying. The warden came over the loudspeaker and said, you need to leave. So we did. We go outside to do the press conference that's part of.

Starting point is 00:05:02 of the witness process and ambulances come to pick her up. There's this wave of emergency vehicles, and they carted her away with sirens on, so we guessed she was still alive. That is Catherine Sweeney with WPLN in Nashville. Thank you for your reporting. Thanks, Sasha. This woman, Krista Pike, remains in the hospital

Starting point is 00:05:19 after the state of Tennessee, tried and failed to execute her yesterday. That execution attempt is the latest in a string of botched executions in that state and across the country. And one of our investigative correspondence here at NPR, Kira Eisener, has been covering executions for years. She's with me now in the studio to talk about more. Kiarra, when I heard this this morning, my first thought was what kind of medical condition is a woman in who has survived two doses of a lethal injection?

Starting point is 00:05:44 Do we know how she's doing? What we know is that in a call to reporters today, her attorney said they haven't been allowed much contact with her. But they did say there's blistering and burning on her arm and she's receiving medical care. This is again after the state administered one dose of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, and she was still talking and breathing. Then the state gave her the second dose an hour later, and Pike was still alive. And as we just heard, reporters could hear her snoring after that second dose. How unusual is it that someone survives in execution? Well, this is the first time that we know of that someone survives two doses of pentobarbital, but it's hardly the first time in execution doesn't go according to plan.

Starting point is 00:06:26 This is part of a much larger pattern. Something similar happened in Tennessee just this past May when the state tried to execute prisoner Tony Carruthers. Maria Delabarado, his lawyer, was behind the curtain with her client as execution workers repeatedly tried and failed again to place needles in his arms, feet, and chest. Tony was in agony, moaning in guttural pain. There was blood. It took close to an hour. And eventually they called off the execution. Just like Pike, Carruthers is also still alive today. Back in 2022, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered an investigation that showed that his state repeatedly failed to follow its own protocols again and again and temporarily paused executions. He paused executions again last night, too. And it's not just Tennessee. States across the country have investigated their own lethal injection protocols. And so has the federal government. After former President Biden paused executions during his presidency, the Department of of Justice released a report that said executions should not be performed by lethal injection anymore because there was just too much risk of the procedure causing pain and suffering.

Starting point is 00:07:37 There was too much room for error. So, Kiera, based on your reporting, why did these mistakes keep happening? Well, one reason is the drugs themselves. All major pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. have refused to make their drugs available to prisons for executions. That means prisoners have a hard time sourcing the drugs. Some have turned to smaller pharmacies that don't always have the highest standards. I reported two years ago that Texas obtained some of their pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy with a history of more than a dozen safety and cleanliness violations. Then you have the question of the quality of the drug after it's been made. States have been shown to have used drugs past their expiration date and they've even used the wrong drug on someone.

Starting point is 00:08:18 You mentioned in the previous case some workers had trouble inserting the needles. So are these staff medically qualified? Is the staffing partly an issue? States like to keep that of information secret. They say that's to protect the privacy of their staff, but multiple lawsuits have been filed across the country, including in Tennessee, that say the states owe more information about the execution team's qualifications to the person being executed and to the public. But we know from previous botched executions that staff often fail to correctly administer the drugs. Pikes lawyers said in a briefing today that unqualified personnel stuck her multiple times, and that should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and torture.

Starting point is 00:08:58 That is NPR's Kiera Eisener. Thanks for covering this. Thanks, Sasha. This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez Hansi, with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Susanna Capiludo, Gigi Dubon, Sarah Handel, and Tin Beat Eremius. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorney. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Sasha Fifer.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Thank you.

Consider This from NPR - A botched execution raises questions about death penalty protocols

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