US death row inmate Christa Pike is “conscious and speaking” after surviving a failed execution attempt in Tennessee last week, her lawyers say.
Pike, 50, continues to receive critical medical care while “handcuffed and shackled to the bed” in hospital, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday. An anaesthesiologist advising her team told the BBC that Pike was able to communicate in a “basic way” but did not seem to recall the execution attempt.
Pike, who was sentenced to death after murdering Colleen Slemmer with her then-boyfriend in 1995, survived two lethal injections on 30 September in Tennessee.
Experts and her legal team say her apparent recovery is unprecedented.
Pike is believed to be the only person to survive a lethal injection. The execution attempt was described immediately afterwards as a “mess” by Slemmer’s mother, who had pushed for Pike to be put to death.
After it became clear Pike would not die, she was taken to hospital, where she remained unconscious for days as medical staff cleared her body of the injected chemical.
In their statement on Tuesday, her lawyers said her prognosis remained unclear, but that “at a minimum, we expect a long recovery”.
In additional comments made to the BBC, the anaesthesiologist advising her team said Pike had been taken off a ventilator.
“She has some memories of being in the hospital but no memory, I believe, of the execution attempt,” Dr Joel Zivot said of the limited communication that had taken place.
Zivot said Pike was able to recall her name and had made an incorrect guess at the date, believing that the month was still September.
In an earlier interview, Zivot said the likelihood of recovering from lethal injection was low. “Most people who get lethal injection die from it,” he explained.
There remained many unknowns, he said, including how much of the drug used by the prison authorities, pentobarbital, got into her system.
“I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her,” he said.
What happened in the failed execution of Christa Pike – and what next?
Deborah Denno, a criminologist and professor at Fordham Law School, said she was “absolutely astonished” that Pike was conscious and speaking.
There had been seven other cases where prisoners survived executions but in those cases, executioners were not able to inject anything into the inmates’ veins, Denno told the BBC.
Pike “is the only person for whom some kind of toxin has been injected”, she said.
“They did everything they were supposed to do as part of the execution process, and it simply didn’t work,” Denno said. “This has never happened before.”
Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, a local journalist who witnessed the attempted execution said that he, too, did not know of “an exact precedent”.
Steven Hale, a journalist for the Nashville Banner, said the case raised many questions, including “what must this be like for the victim’s family, who for 30 years has been told we are gonna give you justice and justice is us executing Christa Pike”.
Authorities have not yet said whether they will try again to execute Pike. They have also not offered an explanation for what went wrong after twice injecting her with the chemical pentobarbital.
Zivot has suggested the pentobarbital was more likely to have spread across the tissue under Pike’s skin than to have entered her bloodstream in a quantity that was sufficient to kill her.
Pike’s lawyers previously warned that her medical history and anatomy – including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins could scupper the execution and cause her pain.
While the incident is investigated, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year – and the head of prisons in the state is resigning.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.
Shipp was 17 years old at the time, meaning that he was spared the death penalty for his part in the attack because he was not yet legally an adult at the time. He remains in prison.
Pike’s lawyers are scheduled to appear in court in Nashville on Wednesday. They also plan to hold a news conference outside the court.
In their latest update, they repeated their call for Lee to use his powers to commute Pike’s sentence to the lower punishment of life in prison without parole.
In 2022, more than a third of executions across the US were botched or highly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks information about such cases.
For lethal injections, such incidents have typically occurred due to difficulty obtaining reliable IV access to the veins, though the underlying reason differs from person to person.
In cases the centre has documented, all failures happened before the lethal drugs could be administered. The last failed lethal injection that was tracked happened earlier this year – also in Tennessee.
The execution of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed in May after staff were unable to find a vein for a lethal injection. He was granted a year’s reprieve by the governor.
BBC
