Tennessee death row inmate survives 2 lethal injections

Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure.

Pike was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said.

Neither the attorneys nor Tennessee Department of Corrections officials provided an update on Pike's condition late Wednesday.

Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 11am. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the US Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday. Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced is "singular and unparalleled."

Seven other people have survived medical problems due to the execution team's failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one has stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.