Last night, Tennessee was scheduled to execute Christa Pike for the 1995 murder of 19 year-old Colleen Slemmer.

The case became sensationalized [as part of the “Satanic Panic” craze] when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”

Pike, who was 18 years-old at the time of the murder, would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.

Yesterday afternoon, though, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit put a pause on the execution based upon issues surrounding (1) her trial counsel failing to present evidence that she had a history of childhood sexual abuse and rape; and (2) how Pike’s PTSD from that trauma would cause cruel and unusual punishment based on Tennessee’s execution protocol. Last night, that stay of execution was taken up by the Supreme Court. As NBC news put it, Pike’s attorneys

had asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, was likely to create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”

In the end, the United States Supreme Court lifted that stay of execution. In a dissent jointed by Justice Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that she saw “no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”

With the Supreme Court lifting the stay, the State twice tried to execute Pike with lethal drugs, but neither attempt was successful. Witnesses described the attempts as “a mess.” It is unclear at this point what effect the attempts had on Pike, but this was the second botched execution this year in Tennessee. Earlier in the year, there was the botched execution of Tony Carruthers, causing him to suffer a stroke and partial paralysis.

As a result of these two botched executions, Governor Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state.

My first law review article all the way back in 2003 — A Death By Any Other Name: The Federal Government’s Inconsistent Treatment of Drugs Used in Lethal Injections and Physician-Assisted Suicide — was on this subject. I wrote that:

From the first lethal injection in 1982 through 2001, there have been 31 reported botched executions by lethal injection. In reality, this number is probably substantially higher, but we cannot be certain of this for two reasons. The first reason is that many states have clandestine execution procedures. Some states allow witnesses to view executions, and these witnesses often become the reporters of botched executions. In other states, however, such as New York, witnesses are not allowed to see the inmate die.

Second, because of the drugs used in lethal injections, witnesses may not be able to observe that a prisoner is in severe pain. In most states, three drugs are used in lethal injections. The physician first uses sodium thiopental to cause the patient to lose consciousness. The second drug administered is pancuronium bromide, which temporarily paralyzes the lungs and diaphragm to stop breathing. The third drug — which actually induces death — is potassium chloride, which permanently stops the inmate’s heart from beating.”

According to studies, when the executioner makes a mistake — “for example, pancuronium bromide is administered first — there is near certainty that the inmate will experience excruciating pain during a lethal injection even without the outside appearance of pain because the pancuronium bromide paralyzes him.” The prisoner’s suffering begins with “an extremely painful sensation of crushing and suffocation” while the prisoner is “unable to move or communicate in any way ….” Later, as “potassium chloride is administered, the prisoner will experience an excruciating burning sensation is his vein … equivalent to the sensation of a hot poker being inserted into the arm ….”