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.
Pike, who was sentenced to death after murdering Colleen Slemmer with her then-boyfriend in 1995, survived two failed lethal injections last Wednesday in Tennessee.
She was taken to hospital, where she remained unconscious for days as medical staff cleared her body of the injected chemical. Experts and her legal team say her apparent recovery is unprecedented.
Pike is believed to be the only person to survive a lethal injection.
Her lawyers said her prognosis remained unclear, but that “at a minimum, we expect a long recovery”.
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.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year – and the head of prisons in the state said over the weekend that he planned to resign.
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.
Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike’s defence team, said on Tuesday that the likelihood of recovering from lethal injection was low.
“Most people who get lethal injection die from it,” he told the BBC. “In fact, pretty well everyone, except Christa. So, the fact that she survived it… was unusual.”
But there remains a lot of uncertainty and many unknowns, he said, including how much of the pentobarbital got into her system, what her blood levels were after the injection and what her recovery will look like.
“I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her,” he noted.
Zivot had previously said the two doses of pentobarbital she received last week would have been enough that, had it entered her bloodstream in normal circulation, “she would have surely died”.
Instead, Zivot said a possible explanation is that instead of entering Pike’s bloodstream, the pentobarbital was more likely to have spread across the tissue under her skin.
Pike’s lawyers previously warned that her medical history and anatomy – including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins – meant there was a risk she would experience “unnecessary” pain and suffering during a lethal injection.
They said on Tuesday that she has endured “severe damage” to her arms.
