Christa Pike is conscious and speaking after botched execution attempt, lawyers say

Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said on Tuesday.

Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative, as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death last Wednesday in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking and continues to receive critical medical care. 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,” attorneys for Pike said in a statement.

Her attorneys said they are grateful for the first responders and the medical team at the hospital “who treated Christa like a human and have provided exceptional care to her”.

“She is the only person known to have survived a complete execution attempt in the US. Christa is a survivor and will take recovery one day at a time. We continue to ask the Governor of Tennessee to commute Christa Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Pike’s attorneys added.

The statement was the first indication that Pike has improved since an ambulance carried her away from a Nashville prison on the night of 30 September.

Witnesses to the attempt to execute Pike described how they they heard she was choking and struggling for an hour after receiving the first injection. She was then hospitalized after a second dose failed to kill her. In hospital, she was put on a ventilator and had been in critical condition.

Following the botched execution attempt, one of Pike’s lawyers, Randy Spivey, called the process “cruel and torturous”, adding that he had counted seven needles in Pike’s left arm, “one of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her”. Her lawyers had warned before the execution that officials might struggle to locate veins and cause her suffering in the process, but the state had pushed to proceed and the US supreme court allowed the prison to move forward.

The disastrous attempt sparked widespread condemnation across the political spectrum and among advocates for banning the death penalty. Tennessee’s prison chief, Frank Strada, also resigned in the aftermath. Strada was facing intensifying scrutiny, with lawyers saying Pike’s case was the fifth “botched” execution under his leadership across two states.

Pike and her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps, in 1995. The case garnered nationwide headlines due to the ages of those involved and the brutality of the murder.

According to prosecutors, Pike was worried Slemmer was trying to take her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, away from her. Together, they lured Slemmer into a wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee on 12 January 1995. Pike cut Slemmer’s stomach and throat with a box cutter before smashing her head with a rock.

Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike later showed a friend a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.

Shipp was convicted of first-degree murder in 1997 and was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike has never denied her involvement in Slemmer’s killing. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement that was included in her clemency petition.

As a child, Pike had been subject to various abuse, including multiple rapes by different men, as well as beatings by her relatives.

Pike later underwent nearly 30 years of solitary confinement while on death row.

In the wake of the botched execution attempt Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun who is perhaps the best-known advocate for abolition of the death penalty in America, told the Guardian: “This is the essence of cruelty. Take a conscious, imaginative human being, give her a date for her death, have her anticipate it over and over again, and then take her out and try and kill her.

“She was rendered defenceless as they deliberately attempted to kill her – what greater mental torture for a human being is there?”

Sam Levin and the Associated Press contributed to this report