Christa Pike Speaks After Surviving Failed Execution in Tennessee

Christa Pike Speaks After Surviving Failed Execution in Tennessee

Christa Pike, a Tennessee death row inmate, is awake and speaking after surviving the state’s failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection.

Pike, 50, remains in hospital where she is receiving medical care after officials gave her two doses of pentobarbital on September 30.

Her lawyers said she is conscious and speaking, although her long-term condition remains unclear.

They said Pike suffered serious injuries to her arms during the failed execution and remains handcuffed and shackled to her hospital bed.

The latest update is the first clear sign of improvement since an ambulance took Pike from the prison in Nashville after the execution attempt.

Witnesses said Pike remained alive and appeared to struggle after the first dose of the lethal drug.

Officials then administered a second dose, but the attempt still failed to kill her. She was later taken to hospital and placed on a ventilator.

Pike’s lawyers had warned before the execution that officials could face problems accessing her veins.

One of her lawyers later said medical staff used several needles while trying to establish access to a vein in her arm.

Her legal team has described the execution attempt as cruel and has asked Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to change her death sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

The failed execution has also triggered an independent investigation in Tennessee. Governor Lee suspended the state’s remaining executions for the year after the incident.

Tennessee’s corrections commissioner, Frank Strada, also resigned after the failed execution as scrutiny grew over the state’s execution procedures.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at Knoxville Job Corps.

Prosecutors said Pike and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer into a wooded area before attacking and killing her.

Shipp was later convicted of first-degree murder and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike has never denied her role in Slemmer’s death. In a clemency petition, she expressed remorse and said she had been a mentally ill 18-year-old at the time.

Her lawyers have also pointed to the abuse she suffered as a child and the nearly three decades she spent on death row.

Pike was scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Instead, the failed lethal injection has placed her case at the centre of fresh scrutiny over execution methods and Tennessee’s death penalty system.