Christa Pike and Sandra Birchmore: Who Got Told First?!

Robin Drake (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

Tony Brueski (0:08)

Let's talk about the botched execution, shall we? Christa Pike, sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, survived Tennessee's September 30th execution attempt after receiving two doses of the lethal injection drug. Her lawyers now say she's conscious and speaking, although her prognosis remains uncertain. New reports coming out saying she doesn't remember the attempt. That's probably a good thing if she's still alive.

Today, or just the other day, a judge ordered the state to preserve evidence from the failed attempt. There's a lot of questions that are going on right now about that attempted execution. What went wrong? What rights does she have? That she's still alive? She beat the execution basically. But what exactly does that mean and how did we get here? We're going to answer all of those questions today. Eric Faddis, defense attorney, former prosecutor is with us to help us do that, along with Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent, chief of the counterintelligence, behavioral analysis program, and master class instructor. Eric, if Christa were your client, what protections would you be demanding right now for her as she recovers in that hospital bed?

Eric Faddis (1:29)

So, the very first one is what her defense has already sought, and that's a preservation of evidence. And that's usually a signal, Tony. That's usually a heads up that, hey, this stuff might be needed for future litigation. So, certainly, her attorneys are being mindful of legal issues that may arise as we sort of proceed in this saga. And so, that's number one, they want to preserve all of the communications between government officials regarding this execution. The physical evidence of, you know, the syringes used, the actual chemical itself, those kinds of things are going to be critical to secure at this point, so they don't up and disappear.

Tony Brueski (2:12)

How important is it when we're looking at this? Because there's going to be two arguments, we're going to talk more about the state itself and the failures on their part, or really the system working as designed with noted infrastructure to support it. We'll get to that. But they were warned. But I'm curious how often warnings are given by the subject, the client, the person that's about to be executed towards the execution process. And obviously, if you're about to die, you might throw anything against the wall if you don't want to be dying. Her lawyers warned months earlier that her small veins and medical conditions could make it difficult to deliver the execution drugs properly. They were asking about other options that might be available. Tennessee just kept coming back to, yeah, we can't accommodate any of that.

We do the lethal injection thing despite not having a great track record of it.

What does that mean? Does it mean anything that they're raising issue early on now that this has kind of crossed into the cruel and unusual punishment territory?

Eric Faddis (3:20)

Oh, it very well could.

Any good lawyer is going to try to set up potential claims that could be brought later on to preserve those claims. This notice to the government of, hey, Christa might have a venous issue when it comes to the administration of this lethal injection. It might result in serious problems. You guys should consider something else. What that does is it shows the government had knowledge. They had, they knew that this could go wrong. And so Christa Pike's attorneys are going to argue that the government was not only negative, but they were reckless. They had this knowledge and they knowingly disregarded this substantial and unjustifiable risk that this thing could go south in a really grotesque way. And they said, oh, well, this lady is on death row. We don't care about her. We're going to do it anyway.

That might show some callousness as well. But the recklessness could give traction to civil and potentially appellate criminal claims down the road.

Robin Drake (4:18)

Yeah, Eric, so that's what I'm struggling with. I just researched this. And yeah, there's been no death sentence that's been overturned because of circumstance like this. They've all gone through one way or the other. And horrendously in a lot of cases because it was botched the first time and it actually got botched multiple times after sometimes. But I'm curious, you know, like we're just talking about in this case right here. So here you have an individual that it seems like is pretty physically incapable of being killed in this manner because of their biology. And when you can't guarantee it and the state says there's only one way you're going to execute, what do you do? I mean, what kind of options are out there for, all right, they've been sentenced to death, but they can't be killed this way because either their veins won't work. We can't have a competent person come in and do centerline because the medical professionals won't sit in and do this.