Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.

The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.

In Pike’s case, her lawyers argued, the lethal injection protocol was likely to fail again.

She also had vein issues, they said; if she was subjected to an ordeal like Carruthers’, in which prison officials punctured their prone prisoner more than a dozen times over the course of an hour in an attempt to administer the drug, Pike’s history of trauma, which is lengthy and acute, would serve to make the experience unconstitutionally torturous.

Pentobarbital, the drug that was set to be used to kill Pike, also risked a needlessly painful death.

“The drug supposedly burns very bad,” Pike said in a taped interview just weeks before her scheduled execution. “And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Draino in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me.”

It was to avoid this ordeal that Pike requested to be hanged by the neck until dead instead. Her request was denied.........

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