A Tennessee death row inmate sentenced for a 1995 murder in the United States, Christa Pike, woke up “angry and confused” in a hospital this week after surviving the state’s botched attempt to execute her, her lawyers said on Wednesday.
Pike, 50, was taken to a Nashville hospital a week ago after two injections of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
She was unconscious and critically ill, suffering severe injuries to her arms.
As recently as Monday, her lawyers believed Pike was brain dead and that doctors would remove her from life support the following day.
Her unexpected recovery came after the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, prompting renewed scrutiny of the use of capital punishment in the United States.
“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” one of her lawyers, Randall Spivey, told reporters following a court hearing on Wednesday.
“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”
Pike remains seriously ill and is shackled to her hospital bed, her lawyers said.
She has pneumonia, cannot swallow or eat and is unable to move her “tremendously swollen” hands or arms.
They said it remains uncertain whether she will regain her lost mobility.
Despite her condition, Pike has been speaking with people around her, although her lawyers said she still has some “cognitive confusion.”
She has also been asking about what happened and about several people, including the family of her victim.
“She has wanted to know what’s happened, and she’s asked about several people,” Spivey said. “She’s asked about the victim’s family.”
Pike was sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the 1995 torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate, Colleen Slemmer.
Her lawyers say she is the first person known to have survived a “completed execution attempt” in the United States.
They have described the failed execution as a violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
On Wednesday, Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee officials to preserve evidence from the failed execution.
The order covers syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and the restraints used on the gurney.
Pike’s lawyers said the all-female execution team used at least seven needles during an ordeal that lasted more than two hours.
They said one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.
The judge also ordered the state to preserve internal communications linked to the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.
She has not yet ruled on the lawyers’ request to obtain residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.
Tennessee’s Department of Correction opposed the request, describing the preservation order as “duplicative and unnecessary.”
The department argued that it was already legally required to preserve evidence and was willing to provide most, if not all, of the materials sought by Pike’s lawyers.
Pike’s lawyers said the case was about transparency and determining exactly what happened during the failed execution.
Tennessee and other US states have faced difficulties obtaining execution drugs because major pharmaceutical companies cannot supply them for use in executions due to a European trade ban.
States have instead turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to produce the drugs, while promising to keep the pharmacies’ identities confidential.
“Today’s hearing was about transparency, about why Christa, the courts, the media and the public should not simply take the state’s word about what happened last Wednesday,” another Pike lawyer, Luke Ihnen, told reporters after the judge’s ruling.
Ihnen also renewed the lawyers’ demand that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment and never attempt to execute her again.
Lee rejected a clemency appeal two days before the failed execution, while a spokesperson for the governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pike’s lawyers had previously sought an alternative to lethal injection, arguing that her small veins and related medical conditions made her concerned that something could go wrong.
