Christa Pike woke after surviving botched execution, lawyers say
Convicted killer Christa Pike woke up angry and confused in a Tennessee hospital room, asking, “Where am I?” and “Who are you?” just as her legal team believed she was brain dead and hours away from having her life support removed, her attorneys revealed.
The 50-year-old inmate survived two supposedly fatal doses of the drug pentobarbital inside the death chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on September 30. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Pike is the first person in the United States to survive the administration of lethal injection drugs.
Pike Regains Consciousness After Botched Execution
Media witnesses at the death chamber reported that Pike was still breathing until reporters were escorted from the witness room at 8:53 p.m., with an ambulance arriving at the prison at 9:14 p.m. to transport her to a hospital.
By Monday night, her defense team understood that Pike was brain dead and that life support would be switched off the following day. Instead, attorney Randy Spivey stated, Pike regained consciousness and began talking.
Her lawyers said she suffered from massively swollen hands resembling blown-up surgical gloves, a blood clot in one arm, and pneumonia. She was unable to swallow, had not eaten, and could not move either of her arms. Spivey noted that doctors remained uncertain whether her arms would regain function.
Court Orders State to Preserve Execution Records
Following the failed execution, a Tennessee court ordered the state to preserve and maintain all medical equipment, records, and communications relating to the botched procedure. The emergency court motion was filed by Pike’s legal team.
The Tennessee Attorney-General’s Office argued that a court order was unnecessary, with Assistant Attorney-General John W Ayers maintaining that evidence from the death chamber had already been collected and logged. Meanwhile, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee called the incident deeply disturbing and ordered a comprehensive, third-party review to determine what occurred. Executions in the state have been temporarily paused.
Expert Suggests Small Veins Hindered Sedative Administration
Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician in Atlanta who consulted as an expert for Pike’s legal team, told The New York Times that Pike possesses small veins which likely made it more difficult to insert an intravenous line to administer pentobarbital, a sedative that suppresses respiration.
Zivot stated that it could take weeks or months to determine the extent of Pike’s recovery and whether her competency could eventually be restored if the state attempts to execute her a second time. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 torture and murder of her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, at a job training camp when Pike was 18 years old.