Christa Pike released from hospital, back in prison following botched execution in Tennessee, lawyers say

Christa Pike, the woman whose execution by lethal injection was botched last month in Tennessee, has been released from the hospital and is now back in prison, according to her lawyers.

She has been transferred back to Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she had been held before her planned execution on Sept. 30.

“Christa Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center where she has been housed for more than 30 years,” her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement Saturday. “She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”

Pike, 50, was given two doses of a lethal injection drug, but her legal team confirmed shortly after the failed procedure that, in an unprecedented turn, she was alive and had been hospitalized. One witness, a media attendee, noted she could be heard loudly snoring about one hour after the procedure had started. She was then taken by ambulance to an area hospital.

Her legal team said on Tuesday that she had regained consciousness and was speaking from her hospital bed.

On Wednesday, Pike began “taking limited steps” with help, according to her team. And on Thursday, her attorneys detailed more progress, saying in a statement that she was walking “with some assistance” and her arms were “healing and regaining movement and strength.” They also said that her “lungs are clear, and she has started to eat a regular diet.”

Pike is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court filings show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, slashing her with a meat cleaver and box cutter for up to an hour in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, with help from her boyfriend and a friend.

Pike’s execution was allowed to move forward after the Supreme Court denied a last-minute effort to halt it. She was set to be the first woman executed in the state since 1820. 

It’s still unclear what will happen with Pike moving forward.

Pike’s attorneys attended an emergency hearing in Davidson County court on Wednesday, during which they requested and were granted a decision saying Tennessee’s correctional department must preserve records and other evidence of her failed lethal injection.

Her legal team has renewed its calls for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence, pushing him to change the sentence to life in prison without parole so the state can’t attempt to execute Pike a second time. This is the usual course of action after an inmate survives botched execution proceedings, her attorneys said. 

However, while others have survived botched procedures before, Pike is the only known inmate in the United States’ modern death penalty era to remain alive after actually receiving lethal chemicals.

“The state has made no promises that Ms. Pike will not be subject to a future execution,” Ihnen, one of Pike’s attorneys, said in court on Wednesday.