DEATH row killer Christa Pike is under guard and “may not fully recover” from her botched execution, her attorney has revealed.
Pike, 50, remains hospitalised and critically ill after surviving a double dose of lethal injection on Wednesday.
Her lawyer Stephen Ferrell told CNN: “She is guarded. I’m not sure who may have seen her.
“I know I have not seen her. The state of Tennessee has not yet said whether it will ultimately try to execute her again.”
Pike would have been the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in over 200 years.
But the failed attempt has left her relying on a ventilator as doctors try to get a massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital out of her system.
Her attorneys said prison staff struggled to find a vein and used several needles to try and gain venous access to execute Pike.
Her arms remain burned, blistered and swollen after her attorneys say she was struck with at least seven needles.
And if they don’t execute her, Ferrell believes Pike “may not fully recover”.
“I think one of the main things that will leave this up in the air for a while is the fact that we don’t know what the prognosis is, as in the long term prognosis”, he added.
Several witnesses to the botched execution reported hearing Pike snore in the nearly two hours before prison staff closed the curtain, shut off the microphone and ushered the media out.
“We are working closely with those closest to Christa to respect her wishes, safeguard her privacy and protect her rights as a patient during this extraordinarily difficult time,” Ferrell previously told TMZ.
“We ask that the public and the media respect that privacy as well.”
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the brutal murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
She carried out the deadly attack with her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who Pike said Slemmer was trying to steal from her.
Carved with satanic pentagrams and badly beaten, Colleen’s corpse was first mistaken for an animal.
Pike has never denied killing Slemmer but said she was “a mentally ill 18-year-old kid”.
She has been on death row at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville since she was convicted in 1996.