Christa Pike, the convicted murderer who survived two doses of lethal injection during a botched execution last week, is now conscious and able to speak.
Pike, 50, regained consciousness on Tuesday and does not remember the execution attempt, according to Dr Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician advising her legal team, who spoke to the BBC.
She could recall her name and tried to identify the date, but mistakenly believed it was still September, Zivot said.
Pike was administered two supposedly lethal doses of pentobarbital last Wednesday at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
However, she remained alive and was loudly snoring after the attempted execution. She was taken to hospital, where she had been unconscious and dependent on a ventilator in critical condition.
Her lawyers said Tuesday that, “against all odds,” Pike was now “conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care.”
“Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” they said in a statement. The lawyers again urged Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life in prison.
Pike’s attorneys are also asking a court to order the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve all “relevant physical, written and electronic evidence” connected to the failed execution, according to court documents. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
Christa Pike, 50, woke up Tuesday and reportedly has no memory of the execution attempt
Zivot, who was hired by Pike’s lawyers as a medical expert before the execution, had previously said he believed she was unlikely to recover from the injection.
“Most people who get lethal injection die from it,” he said, according to the BBC.
Although Pike has now regained consciousness, Zivot cautioned: “I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her.”
In an earlier interview with The New York Times, Zivot offered a possible explanation for what went wrong during last week’s attempted execution.
He said Pike has small veins, which could have made it harder to place an intravenous line for administering pentobarbital, a sedative that suppresses breathing.
Pike’s lawyers said her arms turned purple during the procedure and that she complained of a burning sensation.
Zivot said those symptoms indicated that some of the pentobarbital may have entered the tissue in her arms rather than her bloodstream because the IV lines had failed.
He also suggested that the pentobarbital used in the execution may have degraded. Tennessee authorities have not disclosed where the drug came from or how it was prepared.
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Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer at a job-training facility in Knoxville in 1995.
The case drew national attention partly because a pentagram had been carved into Slemmer’s body. Other details of the crime fueled fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
Prosecutors said Pike, who feared Slemmer was attempting to take her boyfriend, lured her into 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 that he carved 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’s lawyers sought clemency citing her age, childhood sexual abuse and mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The case attracted attention in the lead-up to the execution date 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 that it ‘followed every step of the State’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.’
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.
There have been no executions in the US since last Wednesday’s incident.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.
