Christa Pike released from hospital, back in prison after failed execution

In short: 

Death row inmate Christa Pike has been returned to prison after a stint in hospital recovering from a botched execution.

Ms Pike had been recovering in hospital after surviving two lethal injections during an attempted execution by the state of Tennessee last month.

What's next? 

Tennessee's governor has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigations into the botched execution continue.

Christa Pike has been released from a US hospital and sent back to prison after surviving Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection.

Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Centre, where she had been housed for more than 30 years, her attorneys said in a joint statement.

"She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances," the statement read.

"She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery."

Pike was sentenced to death for the murder and torture of a classmate, a crime she committed in 1995, when she was 18-years-old.

On September 30, local time, Pike had been taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and ‌with severe arm injuries after two pentobarbital injections failed to kill her.

At one point she was on a ventilator and her attorneys did not expect her to survive.

She awoke "angry and confused" in the hospital this week her lawyers said, with a long recuperation ahead after surviving the attempted execution.

The Death Penalty Information Center said Pike is the first person to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs during an execution.

The state's prison chief resigned in the wake of the failed execution.

A Tennessee judge this week ordered state officials to preserve all evidence related to their failed attempt to execute her, a development one of her lawyers called the "first of many steps to preserve and enforce her constitutional rights."

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigators look in to the botched execution of Pike and a similar failure involving Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to set up intravenous ​lines.