Christa Pike is conscious and speaking after botched Tennessee execution, attorneys say

Christa Pike, a death row inmate who was subject to a failed execution attempt in Tennessee last week, is conscious and speaking from her hospital bed, her attorneys said Tuesday.

Pike survived the state’s Sept. 30 attempt to execute her by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She has been hospitalized since.

In a statement Tuesday, her attorneys said that she was “conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care,” but noted that “her prognosis remains unclear” and “at a minimum” they “expect a long recovery.”

They also said that “despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed.”

Pike was given two lethal doses of pentobarbital, but according to media witnesses, the execution was canceled when it was determined she had not lost consciousness and still had a heartbeat. One media witness noted that she could be heard loudly snoring about one hour after the procedure had started. She was then taken by ambulance to an area hospital.

One of her attorneys, Steve Ferrell, told “CBS Mornings” on Monday that doctors were working to clear her body of the pentobarbital and that she was on a ventilator. 

Pike was convicted in the 1995 murder of a former classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 at the time of the crime, and 20 when she was sentenced in 1996. 

Pike’s execution was allowed to move forward last week after the Supreme Court denied a last-minute effort to halt it. She was set to be the first woman executed in the state in about two centuries. 

In the wake of the failed execution, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said the state’s prison chief, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada, will resign. Lee also said that all remaining scheduled executions in the state this year have been canceled amid what he said would be a “third-party review” of the botched execution. Pike’s attorneys have also filed a motion in Davidson County court requesting that all evidence related to the failed execution be preserved. 

In that motion, her attorneys also claimed that during the execution, the corrections department team failed to realize that the IV lines had not been correctly placed “or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering” Pike’s body. 

Ferrell told “CBS Mornings” that her legal team would like to see her sentence commuted. 

“The least that could happen now is that we at least take death off the table and start looking for what the future could be for her,” Ferrell said.