US prisoner Christa Pike ‘angry and confused’ after surviving execution attempt
Christa Pike, the United States death-row inmate who survived two execution attempts, was “angry and confused” when she woke in hospital, her lawyers have said.
Pike, 50, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years, recovered consciousness on Tuesday after being in a coma since two lethal injections failed to kill her the previous Wednesday.
Randy Spivey, her lawyer, said his client asked: “Where am I and who are you?” after waking. She had been thought to be brain dead and was due to have her life support removed within hours.
“I think she is angry and confused about everything right now,” he added.
Pike, who was convicted in 1995 of the torture and murder of a teenage classmate, is said to be partially paralysed, with one hand blown up like a “surgical glove”, suffering from pneumonia and unable to swallow.
She is thought to be the first person to survive a lethal injection.
Doctors used seven needles trying to find a suitable vein to administer two doses of pentobarbital, a chemical sedative.
But she was still breathing after the procedure and was taken to hospital, where she was kept alive with a ventilator.
Spivey said Pike was suffering “a lot of cognitive confusion” but was “very aware, up to a point”, including of the attempted execution.
“Christa has a long road to recovery. She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she has not eaten,” he added.
“She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen, and we do not know what, if any, function she will regain in her arms. But we do know that there’s a long road ahead, and that is just the physical toll that all of this is taking.
“Her hands looked like if you were to blow up a surgical glove. The swelling was extraordinary.”
Veins may have ruptured
Pike was also said to have suffered extensive burns during the failed execution, which experts said could be a sign that her veins had ruptured and that the drug, rather than entering her bloodstream, seeped into the surrounding tissue.
Her lawyers have requested that she be unshackled while in hospital, given the damage to her arms and hands.
On Wednesday, Judge I’Ashea L Myles, who is overseeing Pike’s case, ordered state officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including surveillance footage, logbooks, medical records and drugs.
The incident has prompted a reckoning in Tennessee. Bill Lee, the state’s Republican governor, has put a moratorium on capital punishment, while Frank Strada, the prisons chief, stepped down on Saturday while denying wrongdoing.
Marsha Blackburn, the Republican front-runner in the November race to replace Lee as governor, has called for a return to the electric chair to “deliver justice … swiftly”.
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