Christa Pike, the Tennessee death-row inmate who survived two rounds of lethal injection during a failed execution last week, is awake and able to speak.
Pike, 50, regained consciousness on Tuesday but does not remember the execution attempt, according to Dr. Joel Zivot, the anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist advising her legal team in comments to the BBC.
She could identify herself by name, although she was confused about the date and believed it was still September, Zivot said.
Pike’s attorneys are asking a court to order the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all “relevant physical, written and electronic evidence” connected to the botched execution. A hearing on that request is scheduled for noon ET Wednesday.
The state administered two doses of pentobarbital, a drug intended to be fatal, at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution last Wednesday.
However, Pike remained alive and was reportedly snoring loudly after the lethal injection was carried out. She was taken to a hospital, where she spent days unconscious and dependent on a ventilator in critical condition.
“Against all odds,” Pike is now “conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care,” her lawyers said Tuesday.
Her attorneys cautioned that her eventual recovery remains uncertain. “At a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” they said, while again urging Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to reduce Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
Christa Pike, 50, regained consciousness Tuesday and reportedly has no memory of the failed execution attempt, according to an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician advising her lawyers
Pike was given two doses of pentobarbital during the failed lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, last Wednesday
Zivot, who joined Pike’s legal team as a medical expert before the execution, had earlier warned that surviving the injection was highly unlikely.
“Most people who get lethal injection die from it,” he said, according to the BBC.
Although Pike has now regained consciousness, Zivot stressed that her condition remains dangerous. “I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her,” he said.
Her attorneys, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, offered a similar assessment in comments to NBC News, saying they anticipated a lengthy recovery even with the latest improvement.
The lawyers expressed gratitude to the first responders and hospital staff who treated Pike with compassion and delivered what they described as exceptional medical care.
They also thanked supporters around the world who sent prayers, messages and other expressions of concern for Pike.
Officials have not explained precisely what went wrong during the attempted execution. Zivot, however, has previously offered one possible factor.
Speaking to The New York Times, he said Pike’s small veins may have complicated efforts to place the IV needed to deliver pentobarbital, a sedative that can suppress breathing.
Pike remained alive and was loudly snoring after the failed lethal injection before being transported to a hospital, where she was unconscious and on a ventilator in critical condition
Pike, shown at a 2012 court hearing, has regained consciousness but reportedly cannot recall the execution attempt. Her legal team said she remembered her name but was unable to identify the correct date
According to Pike’s lawyers, her arms turned purple during the execution and she reported a burning sensation.
Zivot claims that is an indication that some of the pentobarbital had entered the tissue of her arms and not her bloodstream because of a failure of the IV lines.
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The pentobarbital used for her execution also may have been degraded, he said, although Tennessee authorities have not released any information about its origin or preparation.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and killed their 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, at a job training facility in Knoxville in 1995.
The case garnered national attention because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body, stoking fears of Satan worship during the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s and 1990s.
Prosecutors said Pike, fearing Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on January 12, 1995.
She then cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp admitted to carving the pentagram into the girl’s body.
Shipp was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death.
Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, pictured, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville
Pike’s lawyers sought clemency citing her age, childhood sexual abuse and mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The case attracted attention yet again in the lead-up to the botched execution because Pike would have been the first woman put to death by the state of Tennessee in more than 200 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Officials raised curtains to the execution chamber on September 30 at 7.27pm, showing Pike strapped to a gurney.
‘I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love,’ the killer said in her ‘last’ words. She described herself as at peace.
But Pike remained awake and at one point raised her head and asked prison officials if her arm was supposed to feel that way. It was not clear what she was referencing.
By 8.26pm, execution witnesses reported that the second dose of pentobarbital had been administered.
Pike continued to be heard snoring behind the closed curtain until the microphone was cut off at 8.53pm. Witnesses were then escorted out of the area.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement last week that it ‘followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.’
Pike, pictured as a teenager, did not deny killing Slemmer, but in her clemency petition pointed to having been a ‘mentally ill 18-year-old kid’
Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, was 17 when the crime happened and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one sentenced to death
The state’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered ‘if the inmate is not deceased’ after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.
This was the second time this year that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution.
In May, state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for over an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.
There have been no executions in the US since last Wednesday’s incident.
The Daily Mail has approached Pike’s legal team for comment.
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