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Christa Pike's Failed Execution Renews U.S. Death Penalty Debate; Protests Target Cornell Univ. Handling Of Alleged Gang Rape; U.S. National Intelligence Director To Head A.I. Task Force. Aired 4- 4:30a ET

Aired October 05, 2026 - 04:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[04:30:00]

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KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. I'm Kristie Lu Stout. Now, Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is still critically ill and unconscious in the hospital after surviving a failed execution attempt by lethal injection, and now her medical and legal future remain unclear. One of Pike's lawyers spoke to CNN about what obligation he thinks this state has to her now?

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STEPHEN FERRELL, CHRISTA PIKE'S ATTORNEY: At the very least, the governor should commute Ms. Pike's death sentence to a life sentence, at the very least. We had already asked that the governor commute her for -- for many good reasons. I think she's spent over 30 years in prison, most of that in solitary confinement, only to be taken out and not executed, but tried to execute her.

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LU STOUT: Now, CNN's Jenn Sullivan takes a look at Christa Pike's case and how it is renewed debate about the death penalty in the U.S.

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JENN SULLIVAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The woman who survived a failed execution in Tennessee last week is still in the hospital. Lawyers for 50-year-old Christa Pike say she's currently on a ventilator and unconscious.

FERRELL: We don't know what the prognosis is. She may not fully recover, and there may be issues about her competence.

SULLIVAN: Pike was 18 years old when she killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1995. She was sentenced to death. She was scheduled to be executed last Wednesday. She was injected with two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital, but she survived.

FERRELL: We don't know what drugs there were, whether manufactured, compounded, how well they were preserved, what was done with them. SULLIVAN: Pike's failed execution has renewed debate about how these procedures are carried out.

JUSTIN JONES, FORMER DIRECTOR, OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION: You have basically a medical procedure with the advent of lethal injection for executions, but then you have some non-medical staff, and then you have staff that have medical training, but they're not the level of medical staff that you would see in a hospital doing a procedure.

SULLIVAN: A recent poll conducted over the summer found 66 percent of Americans support the death penalty for people convicted of murder. At a rally in Ohio, Saturday night, President Donald Trump called to expand the. Death penalty.

[04:35:00]

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And we will pass the death penalty for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and anyone who ever kills a police officer or law enforcement official.

SULLIVAN: The governor of Tennessee has suspended all new executions for the rest of the year and announced a third party will investigate Pike's failed execution. I'm Jenn Sullivan reporting.

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LU STOUT: Now the pressure is building at Cornell University over the school's handling of an alleged gang rape by several fraternity members in 2024. Demonstrators held a rally off campus on Sunday in support of the accuser, and 20 student organizations plan on-campus protests in the days ahead. CNN's Law Enforcement Reporter Mark Morales has more on the growing demands for accountability.

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MARK MORALES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: A large number of demonstrators gathered about a mile away from campus today in just the most recent show of frustration with how this case has been handled. Now they spoke at large about how unhappy they were with how the university and the local district attorney has handled this case, but also their message was one of support. They supported Jane Doe, anybody that's in a similar situation to her, not just at Cornell University, but at universities all over.

And they're not the only ones that have been expressing how unhappy way they were about this investigation. We've heard from New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who has since put in the New York Attorney General Letitia James in charge of the criminal investigation on this side. But we also heard from Jane Doe's attorney.

His issue from the very beginning was how the District Attorney's office was looking at the evidence that they had already had, and they based most of their decision not to pursue charges on a six-page document that Jane Doe signed. But the attorney says that that document was severely lacking in a lot of real key parts of evidence that it did not have. Take a listen. MICHAEL KOTLIKOFF, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: Not communicated enough about what the university did after the assault was reported, which has led to distrust. There are real legal and privacy limits on what we can say, but we will make a greater effort to explain what we can, to provide context about the actions Cornell has taken, and to be more transparent.

This message. beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing, constructive, and dynamic conversation with our community. In the coming weeks, we will create additional opportunities for members of our community to ask questions and hear directly from university leadership. That will include opportunities for Cornell leadership.

MORALES: Now, remember, there's going to be two separate investigations happening here. There's the criminal side that's going to be done by the Attorney General in her office, and she's going to have the power to go through and conduct interviews, search for evidence, whether that's search warrants. She's going to have the full prosecutorial power that's going to be given to her to find out what happens.

But on the other side, there's major questions for how the university handled this. How did local university police handle this? And that's going to be done by an independent investigator that's going to be hired by the university to do that forensic analysis and to basically figure out what went wrong. Mark Morales, CNN, New York.

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LU STOUT: Now, right now, we're going to bring up live pictures of a state ceremony in Jerusalem. The event is honoring the memory of the victims of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and the fallen soldiers of the subsequent war. Israel's President Isaac Herzog is speaking right now. The Prime Minister and Defense Minister, among the other top officials who are expected to speak at today's memorial ceremony.

Now, President Donald Trump has announced leadership for a new A.I. task force comprised of federal government officials. Jay Clayton, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence, will lead that team. The president says the task force will quote ensure that America continues to lead the world in A.I. development, an idea for the group that was floated last month amid growing calls for regulation and oversight.

But President Trump has said on multiple occasions that outpacing China and preserving economic gains driven by A.I. are his top priorities. Now, the formation of that team comes after a dire warning from a former safety employee at OpenAI, and he detailed his concerns in an article titled "I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken."

It was published in The Atlantic. Now, the man says that he worked for years overseeing safety reports and drafting the company's plans to address problems. He argues that advanced A.I. systems need strict safeguards, like those found in aviation or in the nuclear power industry. And ultimately, he claims A.I. capabilities are advancing faster than researchers can understand. Joining me now is Elena Simperl. She is the Co-Director of the King's

Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is a Professor at King's College in London. Elena, thank you very much indeed for joining us here on CNN Newsroom.

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What do you make of this latest A.I. safety resignation and that article written by Robinson?

ELENA SIMPERL, CO-DIRECTOR, KINGS INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Well, I can't say I'm surprised, but I think it is good to see people who know the industry inside out coming forward and -- and -- and -- and sharing this information. This is not the first time in -- in recent months that we have seen changes in the A.I. safety team at OpenAI and what has been less discussed in the media is the fact that their head of A.I. safety left a few months ago already.

And then before David Robinson's open letter last week, we also heard that OpenAI dismissed three safety researchers for what they say was allegedly sharing information with an external testing organization.

And now, David Robinson left, wrote this open letter about the company's A.I. safety culture, and -- and he said essentially what many independent experts in the A.I. community have been saying all along over the past months that the latest cyber incidents could have been prevented with a more careful, with a more thoughtful approach to how technology is tested.

And so, it's less about the fact that we don't understand what is happening. It is more a fact that technology is improving. These are not toys. These are very powerful technologies that have taken a lot of research and funds to develop, but yet they've been tested and -- and assessed in a careless way, and the companies have admitted to some of it. But his open letter worryingly says that the culture hasn't changed, and I think this matters for a number of reasons.

So, you've mentioned safety reports. So, this is someone who knows the industry inside out. He wrote these safety reports for 12 of the latest OpenAI Frontier launches. Safety reports are essentially what a company chooses to disclose about a new release publicly. So now, if the person who wrote 12 of these reports comes out and says the company culture is broken, then how much can we, the public, trust what these documents say?

And going back to last week, President Trump spoke about the fact that the accord, the agreement that the companies have signed, is morally binding. A few days later, basically, we hear about potential breaches. So -- so this this raises questions about -- about what we actually know and what is being disclosed, and the other important thing is as things stand --

LU STOUT: Yeah, it raises --

SIMPERL: Please go ahead. LU STOUT: It raises a number of important questions. You know, and

it's -- it's important that you just brought up that you know Robinson is just the latest A.I. safety expert to resign from Open A.I., and that we only know about this culture that he's criticizing because he resigned, he left, and he's exposing them for it. Robinson is also calling for nuclear-style safeguards. I wanted to ask you, is that realistic? Can engineering controls from the nuclear sector or even aviation can that be applied to A.I.? Because people are looking for solutions here.

SIMPERL: Yes, absolutely. And I think there's two components to this problem. There is the -- the engineering of powerful A.I. systems and the techniques that we have to make sure that these technologies are aligned to -- to what we people, their developers, their users want them to do, but then independently of this, self-regulation for powerful national security technologies can work.

Just like we have shown at global scale that it can work for nuclear power, it can work for aviation, and we've done this in times that were just as trying as the ones that we are living through today, but there is one important component there. In these safety critical industries, there was a strong regulator behind them, and there was independent inspection, mandatory incident reporting.

And at the moment we don't have any of these in -- in -- in A.I. Instead, we have self-policing and morally binding agreements, which basically means that unless we hear what is happening, like we've heard recently in the -- in the -- in the open letter, we don't really know what is happening.

LU STOUT: Got it.

SIMPERL: So Hugging Face for instance, if Hugging Face would have not reported the incident in July to the FBI --

LU STOUT: Right. That's right.

SIMPERL: -- we don't know what -- what -- what would have happened, right?

[04:45:00]

LU STOUT: That's right. And you just laid out for us, and thank you for that, Elena Simperl, about what is needed in terms of strong oversight, a regulatory body to look after A.I., because right now we're not getting that in terms of independent inspection or a strong regulator-that is what's needed right now.

Elena, we're going to have to leave it at that. But thank you very much indeed for joining us here on the program, Elena Simperl.

SIMPERL: Thank you for having me.

LU STOUT: Now, the Japanese government, meanwhile, is investigating after police arrested a U.S. Marine on suspicion of murder on Okinawa. We've got the details of that story next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LU STOUT: Welcome back. Now, an investigation is underway in Japan after an American Marine was arrested on suspicion of murdering a woman while stationed on Okinawa Island. The Japanese government has filed a rare formal protest with the U.S. calling the alleged killing extremely brutal and heinous. Hanako Montgomery has more.

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HANAKO MONTGOMERY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We're getting more details now about a gruesome murder in Okinawa. Police have arrested a suspect, 20-year-old Lance Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard, a U.S. Marine stationed in the prefecture. He was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of killing 39-year-old Anna Yagi. Police say Anna was found collapsed inside a hotel room in the early hours of Saturday, and that she died from strangulation.

They're also investigating the case as a possible robbery, given that some of Anna's belongings were taken from the room and later found discarded nearby. Investigators have also told us that security camera footage shows a man believed to be a foreign national with a shaved head entering the hotel room with Anna and later leaving with her belongings.

Now Ballard, the suspect, has denied the allegations, according to the police, and the investigation is ongoing. Now separately, both the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Embassy in Japan have expressed their condolences with the Embassy also adding that the U.S. is cooperating with Japanese authorities over this investigation.

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Now, this case has stirred up a lot of anger in Japan, where the Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has lodged a rare protest against the United States. She's also called for the quote, fullest possible cooperation with the investigation, thorough discipline among U.S. military personnel, and measures to prevent the recurrence of crimes and accidents.

And for people in Okinawa, this stirs up painful memories of 2016, when similarly, a woman in Okinawa was murdered. Now, this victim was also raped, and later, a former U.S. Marine was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for those crimes. And many in Okinawa point to the fact that they shoulder what they call an unfair burden-that a majority of U.S. military bases in Japan are stationed in Okinawa and they argue that therefore there are more violent crimes involving U.S. military personnel in the prefecture.

So, this case has added to these longstanding issues, longstanding friction between military bases belonging to the United States and Okinawans. It's also added to the frustration that many locals feel over a number of issues involving sex crimes and U.S. military personnel, and they're also calling for greater accountability over the murder of Anna Yagi. Hanako Montgomery, CNN, Tokyo.

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LU STOUT: Well, the FBI has charged a California woman with acting as an unregistered agent for China and spying on the Taiwan president's relative's son and his family. A 34-year-old Wanying Heather Zhang was arrested on Sunday, and according to the U.S. government complaint, Zhang flew to Seattle in 2025 to surveil the Taiwan president's relative and to take photos.

And the U.S. Attorney office in Central California says that she coordinated the trip using trade craft to avoid being caught, and did not notify the U.S. that she was acting for foreign government. Zhang is due to appear in court on Monday. You're watching CNN Newsroom. We'll be right back.

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LU STOUT: OK, this just in. King Charles's younger brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has launched legal action against police in England over his arrest earlier this year on suspicion of misconduct in public office, following revelations from the Epstein files. Mountbatten-Windsor has asked for a judge to determine if Thames Valley Police's actions against him earlier this year were lawful.

He has lodged a judicial review in relation to the search warrants that were executed at his home and his former home, and a court hearing will be held on Thursday, according to British media. Now the former Duke of York became the first senior royal in centuries to be arrested in February. No charges have so far been filed, and he has vehemently denied any and all wrongdoing.

Thank you for watching. I'm Kristie Lu Stout. CNN Headline Express is next.

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