Media witnesses to the botched execution of Christa Pike described how the satanist killer lifted her head and asked if the pain was normal after a second round of the lethal drug cocktail was administered.

Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, somehow survived the double dose of the highly potent sedative, Pentobarbital, Wednesday - with reporters describing how the failed execution played out unlike anything they had ever seen.

 They went through two rounds, and she was still breathing at the end, it was very ragged, she lifted her head up and was looking around at one point. She said there was a spot that was burning and hurting and asked if that was normal,  Catherine Sweeney of WPLN said at a press briefing after the execution was put on hold.

6 Christa Pike survived the double dose of Pentobarbital during her botched execution. TDOC / SWNS

 None of that was normal. 

Pike, 50, was strapped to a gurney in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution's death chamber just before 7:30 p.m. CDT an hour after her stay of execution was overturned by the Supreme Court.

 When they told us to leave at 8:53 Christa Pike was still breathing. They did two separate rounds of pentobarbital - which I've never seen before - the protocol does say that they should do a second round if the person is still alive,  Sweeney recounted.

 I covered all of the executions last year and most of the ones this year, we haven't seen anything like it. 

Tennessee's execution protocol calls for a second set of syringes to be administered  if the inmate is not deceased  after the first injection. However, it does not specify what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Critics of the death penalty condemned the Tennessee Department of Corrections' use of lethal injections.

 The state of Tennessee has shown the world it cannot be trusted to implement capital punishment in a way that preserves human dignity and the rule of law. This has to stop now,  Laura Porter, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, said in a statement to 

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