Attorneys for Christa Pike, the only woman currently on Tennessee’s death row, are asking a court to consider hanging as an alternative method of execution as they challenge whether the state’s lethal injection protocol can be carried out constitutionally in her case.
WKRN News 2 reporter Katelyn Quisenberry said Pike is scheduled to be executed on September 30 for the 1995 killing of a fellow Knoxville Job Corps member, a crime committed when Pike was 18 years old. Her attorneys are arguing that her physical, medical and psychological conditions could make execution under the state’s existing procedures unnecessarily painful.
The request has led to an unusual courtroom debate over a method Tennessee has not used for more than a century, with lawyers questioning an expert about how judicial hanging causes death, how often it fails and what would happen if the procedure were performed incorrectly.
Pike’s Lawyers Point To Problems With Lethal Injection
Quisenberry reported that Pike’s legal team has been challenging Tennessee’s execution protocols while citing what happened during the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers, whose lethal injection could not proceed after medical personnel were unable to establish the required intravenous access…