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Christa Pike can recall her name and has memories of being in hospital after surviving two botched lethal injections, a doctor who advised her legal team said.
Pike, 50, is conscious and speaking after becoming the first death row inmate believed to have survived lethal injection after the bungled execution last week, her lawyers revealed Tuesday.
“She has some memories of being in the hospital but no memory, I believe, of the execution attempt,” Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist who has advised Pike’s lawyers, told the BBC.
Zivot added that Pike is able to communicate in a “basic way” and made an incorrect guess at the date, believing that it was still September, the outlet reported.
He added that she has been taken off a ventilator after being intubated while medical professionals worked to clear the pentobarbital in her system from the lethal injections.
Pike was administered two doses of pentobarbital using at least 7 needles, one of which came out of her arm bent at a 90-degree angle, her legal team claimed.
The convict was initially described as unconscious and in critical condition after being rushed from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville to the hospital last Wednesday.
“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care,” her attorneys said Tuesday.
“Despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed. Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery.”
She was handed a death sentence for brutally murdering her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in Jan. 1995.
Pike’s attorneys have pleaded with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence, saying that she has “endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
They filed a motion in court on Friday for the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to “protect and preserve any and all evidence” related to Pike’s botched execution.
In their motion, they branded TDOC’s actions during the bungled execution as “incompetent and reckless.”
“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” they wrote.
