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PHOENIX (AZFamily/AP) — Christa Pike was in critical condition Thursday and receiving “lifesaving care” at a hospital, her lawyers said, a day after a failed attempt to execute her pushed Tennessee’s governor to halt further executions this year and order an independent review.
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Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, was taken to a hospital Wednesday night after surviving a double dose of the drug Tennessee uses to execute prisoners.
“It’s certainly difficult to figure out both the composition and when you don’t have real doctors attending and you have volunteers,” explained Barrett Marson, former Arizona Department of Corrections Director of Communications, on why executions can be tough to execute perfectly.
Arizona has its own complicated history with executions. Anyone convicted of a crime in the state that was committed after November 23, 1992 is executed by lethal injection.
Marson has witnessed four executions himself. He said all of those went as expected, but it’s not always the case.
“Death penalty is the ultimate punishment. So once you put a person to death, you can never go back from that,” said Benjamin Taylor, a criminal defense attorney in Phoenix who has defended death row inmates.
In Arizona’s history, no executions were done between 1962 and 1992. After the execution of Joseph Wood dragged on for nearly two hours in July 2014, there were no executions performed from that point until to 2022.
After Governor Katie Hobbs took office in 2023, her office paused all executions and announced a Death Penalty Independent Review Commissioner. Executions resumed in Arizona in 2025.
Taylor says what happened in Tennessee should serve as a warning to Arizona.
“Arizona should be extremely concerned. I mean, it’s still going on. Evidence proved just now in Tennessee it happened and then could happen again in Arizona. Until the science and the medical evidence gets way more advanced, we’re going to continue to have botched executions here in Arizona,” he said.
The controversy around executions in Arizona go beyond the pauses and botched instances.
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In 2015, the Arizona Department of Corrections got caught trying to illegally import an anesthetic that has been used to carry out executions but was no longer manufactured by companies approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
“It is incredibly difficult to get some of the drugs in the cocktail because the drug companies will not sell to a corrections department because they know what it’s going to be used for,” explained Marson.
Marson said sometimes states can also run into issues finding people to administer the lethal injection, which can also play a factor in some of these botched executions.
“Anytime you’re talking about medical procedures, it would be good to have a medical doctor there. But sometimes it’s hard to find a doctor who believes in that Hippocratic oath that they take of do no harm, and to put someone to death,” he said.
Still, executions are happening in Arizona as recently as May.
“It’s simply the law and here in Arizona, we are a state that supports the death penalty,” said Marson.
There are currently 107 people on death row in Arizona. No executions are currently scheduled, but the Arizona Attorney General has filed motions to set an execution date as early as January for a man convicted in the 1995 killing of an Arizona State Trooper.
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