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One month after Christa Pike survived a botched execution attempt, her attorneys filed an emergency motion demanding she be released from solitary confinement.
The convicted murderer, 50, was set to be the first woman put to death in Tennessee in over 200 years, but instead became the first prisoner ever to survive after being given the lethal drugs.
Now, she is in solitary confinement at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, “largely isolated in the prison’s medical ward, away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me,” Pike said in her first statement since her Sept. 30 attempt, released by her legal team Friday.
Her attorneys filed an emergency motion Friday which argued her current placement in the prison infirmary where she is denied “meaning human contact,” violates the terms of a prior settlement agreement, WMSV4 reported.
Pike — who has spent decades in solitary confinement after being sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer — challenged her isolated conditions in 2022 and reached a settlement two years later.
The 2024 settlement allowed the convicted killer to work, eat and spend time with fellow prisoners, the local station reported.
In the emergency motion, Pike’s attorneys begged the court to order the Tennessee Department of Corrections to end the murderer’s “indefinite isolation” and restore her conditions of confinement.
“She has almost no social interaction,” one of her attorneys Stephen Farrell told WKRN. “So we’re very concerned with her condition, both physically and mentally.”
Since her bungled execution attempt, Pike said “there hasn’t been a moment since that night where I haven’t been in pain.”
“My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said in the statement on Friday.
The convicted killer admitted “I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger. But healing is not the same as being okay.”
Pike was rushed to the hospital after surviving two doses of pentobarbital and was released back to the prison on Oct. 10 where she returned to solitary confinement.
“That isolation brings its own kind of pain,” Pike said. “I spent 28 years in solitary confinement and much of what I am experiencing today is a repeat of that condition.”
Following the fiasco, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee halted all executions in the Volunteer State for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review –– while prisons boss Frank Strada resigned.
“It wasn’t just a glitch in the system or, you know, an inability to find venous access,” Farrell argued.
“The state of Tennessee says that it accomplished or that it went through every step of its protocol and did everything the right way. And yet she survived.”
“That’s unprecedented in modern history,” he added.
