The Tennessee death row inmate is recovering in a Nashville hospital after two lethal injections failed to kill her last week.
Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is conscious and speaking in a hospital after two lethal injections failed to kill her during an execution attempt last week, her attorneys said Tuesday.
Pike, 50, is receiving critical medical care at a hospital in Nashville, where she remains handcuffed and shackled despite severe injuries to her arms, according to her lawyers, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason. Prison staff administered two injections of pentobarbital on Sept. 30. When the execution failed, Pike was taken to the hospital and placed on a ventilator while medical personnel worked to clear the drug from her system.
Pike’s legal team described her condition as “unprecedented,” with BBC News reporting that her lawyers called the recovery “medically unprecedented.” Her lawyers said she is the only person known to have survived a completed execution attempt in the United States. Although Pike is now awake, her prognosis remains unclear. “At a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” Spivey and Gleason said in a statement.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed Slemmer after meeting her at a job training camp for troubled teens. If the lethal injection had killed her, Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years.
State authorities haven’t explained what went wrong or said whether they will try to carry out the Christa Pike execution again. Her attorneys said they believe problems with IV lines may have caused the pentobarbital to flow directly into her body instead of her bloodstream.
Following the botched Tennessee execution, Gov. Bill Lee ordered an independent review and paused all executions in the state for the rest of the year. On Saturday, Lee announced the resignation of Frank Strada, Tennessee’s top prison official. In a statement, Strada said the Department of Correction had followed established protocol, but that stepping aside was in the “best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward.” Pike’s attorneys said they will hold a news conference Wednesday.
