Convicted killer Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee's effort to execute her by lethal injection last week, foiling the state's first attempt to put a woman to death in two centuries, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday. Despite severe injuries to her arms from the insertion of intravenous lines during the attempted execution last Wednesday, Pike, 50, is "still handcuffed and shackled" to her hospital bed while she remains under medical care, her team of public defence attorneys wrote. "Her prognosis remains unclear, but at a minimum we expect a long recovery," the lawyers' statement said, adding that a court hearing on Pike's case was scheduled for Wednesday in Davidson County Chancery Court.
Pike, sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture-murder of a 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer three decades ago, survived the botched execution attempt on the night of September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital. She has been hospitalised since then. Her lawyers said on Friday that their client remained unconscious, critically ill and hooked to a ventilator to breathe, as doctors laboured to clear the drug pentobarbital from her system.
"Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking and continues to receive critical medical care," they wrote on Tuesday. Read moreTennessee prison chief who oversaw botched Christa Pike execution resigns Pike's petition for clemency, denied last week by Governor Bill Lee, argued that her death sentence had failed to properly account for Pike's own childhood trauma as the victim of sexual abuse, neglect and untreated mental illness. Pike went from being the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death since the early 19th century to becoming the first person in the United States known to have survived after execution drugs were administered.
Death penalty opponents said the incident exposed the inherent barbarity of executions. It also highlighted the difficulties of carrying out lethal injections while respecting constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. Pike's attorneys and journalists who witnessed the execution attempt described it as roughly 2-1/2 hours of disarray and prolonged distress for her as Department of Correction personnel struggled to administer two doses of pentobarbital intravenously.
"None of it was normal," Catherine Sweeney, a reporter for Nashville public broadcaster WPLN, recounted. "It went really poorly." Pike was heard gasping, crying, whimpering and breathing loudly through much of the procedure, at one point saying, "my arm feels like it's about to burst open." The bungled attempt to establish intravenous lines left both of Pike's arms "swollen, burned and blistered," the apparent result of the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeping into the tissues under her skin, her lawyers said in court filings. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement.
One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. The lawyers accused state officials of having shrugged off prior warnings from Pike's doctors that her small veins and a blood disorder called thrombocytosis would make placing IV lines especially difficult.
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