A 50-year-old Tennessee death row inmate, Christa Pike, remained alive after officials administered two doses of a lethal drug during an attempted execution on Wednesday.
Pike was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Media witnesses reported that Pike was still awake and snoring more than 40 minutes after the second dose of pentobarbital was administered, according to the Associated Press.
The Tennessee Department of Correction had not provided a public explanation for the failed execution as of Thursday morning, while Pike’s lawyers sought emergency court intervention to stop the process.
The attempted execution followed a series of last-minute legal developments.
The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had temporarily halted the execution shortly before it was due to begin, allowing more time to consider arguments that evidence of Pike’s childhood sexual abuse and neglect had not been properly considered when she was sentenced to death.
The US Supreme Court later overturned the stay, allowing Tennessee to proceed. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, 17, killed Slemmer, whom they knew from the Knoxville Job Corps training centre.
Prosecutors said Pike and Shipp attacked Slemmer after Pike accused her of trying to take her boyfriend. Slemmer was beaten and stabbed, while a pentagram was carved into her body.
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the killing, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Pike’s lawyers have argued that her age, history of severe childhood abuse and neglect, and mental health history should have been considered during sentencing.
They previously said she had suffered sexual abuse as a child and that important evidence about her background was not adequately presented to the jury.
Her request for clemency was rejected by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who said he had reviewed the case but would not intervene.
If carried out, the execution would have made Pike the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Women account for a small proportion of executions in the United States. Eighteen women have been executed since capital punishment resumed in 1976, compared with more than 1,600 men, according to figures cited by the Associated Press.
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