WASHINGTON: Christa Pike, sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, awoke “angry and confused” in a hospital this week with a long recuperation ahead after surviving Tennessee’s botched effort to execute her, her lawyers said on Wednesday (Oct 7).
A week ago, Pike, 50, was taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and with severe arm injuries after two injections of the caustic barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
As late as Monday, her lawyers believed Pike was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day following the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, which has renewed scrutiny of capital punishment in the US.
“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” Randall Spivey, one of her lawyers, told reporters after a court hearing on Wednesday, where a judge ordered Tennessee officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the botched execution.
“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”
Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigators look into the botched executions of Pike and of Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to set up intravenous lines.
Pike remains very sick and shackled to her hospital bed, facing a long road to recovery, her lawyers said. She cannot swallow or eat, has pneumonia, cannot move her “tremendously swollen” hands or arms, and it is unclear if she will regain her lost mobility, they said.
Although she still has “cognitive confusion,” the lawyers said, she has been speaking with those around her.
“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.
She is the first person known to have survived a “completed execution attempt” in the US, her lawyers say, calling it a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.
Discussion about this post