Christa Pike, whose lethal-injection execution was botched in Tennessee last month, has left the hospital and returned to prison, her attorneys said.
Pike was transferred to the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she had been held before her scheduled execution on Sept. 30.
“Christa Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she has been housed for more than 30 years,” attorneys Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason said in a statement Saturday. “She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Pike, 50, received two doses of the lethal-injection drug, but her legal team confirmed soon after the failed procedure that she was still alive and had been hospitalized. A media witness said Pike could be heard loudly snoring about an hour after the execution began. She was later taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital.
Her attorneys said Tuesday that Pike had regained consciousness and was speaking from her hospital bed.
By Wednesday, Pike had begun “taking limited steps” with assistance, according to her legal team. Her attorneys reported further improvement Thursday, saying she was walking “with some assistance” and that her arms were “healing and regaining movement and strength.” They added that her “lungs are clear” and she had begun eating a regular diet.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Pike is the only known person to have survived an execution attempt in the United States.
Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal killing of her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Court filings say Pike, who was 18 at the time, tortured and killed Slemmer in a wooded area of the University of Tennessee campus, slashing her with a meat cleaver and a box cutter for as long as an hour. Her boyfriend and a friend also took part in the attack.
Pike’s execution proceeded after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute request to stop it. She was scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820.
What happens to Pike next remains uncertain.
Pike’s attorneys appeared at an emergency hearing in Davidson County court Wednesday. They requested—and received—an order requiring Tennessee’s corrections department to preserve records and other evidence related to the failed lethal-injection procedure.
Her legal team has renewed its appeal to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence, seeking to have it changed to life in prison without parole. That would prevent the state from attempting to execute her again, which her attorneys said is the usual course after an inmate survives a botched execution.
Although other prisoners have survived flawed execution attempts, Pike is the only known inmate in the modern U.S. death-penalty era to remain alive after lethal chemicals were administered.
“The state has made no promises that Ms. Pike will not be subject to a future execution,” Ihnen, one of Pike’s attorneys, told the court Wednesday.
