A Tennessee execution failed and left the prisoner awake with burned arms
She survived the procedure with burns on both arms, and her lawyers are now asking a court to preserve the evidence.
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Pike, who is held on death row in Tennessee, lived through a recent attempt to execute her by injection and is now conscious and talking. According to her lawyers, both of her arms carry severe, caustic burns where the chemicals settled outside her blood vessels.
Her attorneys say the drugs leaked out of her veins into the surrounding tissue. Instead of traveling through her bloodstream, the chemicals pooled in her arms and burned them.
Her lawyers will ask a court to make the state keep the evidence from the failed execution.
Steve Gorman, a reporter for Reuters, said her lawyers could argue the attempt was cruel and unusual punishment. He said they could use that argument to ask for a halt to further attempts, since the Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment.
Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, has halted executions in the state through the rest of the year while officials conduct a comprehensive inquiry to learn what failed and what happened.
Questions people ask
Why would a leaked execution drug cause burns?
Lethal injection drugs are strong chemicals that are meant to stay inside the vein. When they leak into surrounding tissue, a process doctors call extravasation, they can irritate and kill cells on contact. That can cause pain, swelling, blistering, and what look and feel like chemical burns.
Can surviving an execution keep the state from trying again?
Survival alone does not automatically stop another attempt, and double jeopardy generally does not apply to a failed execution. But lawyers can ask a court to block a second try by arguing that the first attempt amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. A judge would then decide whether another execution could proceed, and under what method.