Execution survivor Krista Gail Pike may have suffered brain damage

Tennessee death row survivor Christa Gail Pike likely suffered permanent brain damage.

Problems during the execution could be associated both with the narrow veins of the convict and with the quality of the drug.

Pike was convicted of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995 and would have become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

MOSCOW, October 4 - RIA Novosti. Tennessee death row survivor Krista Gail Pike likely suffered permanent brain damage and her recovery will take a long time, said anesthesiologist Joel Zivot, who advised the woman's lawyers before her execution.

"Given that Pike was hospitalized more than an hour after the fatal drug was administered, it is very possible that she suffered permanent brain injury," the doctor wrote in a column for the New York Times.

The expert did not rule out that the problems that arose during the execution could be associated both with the prisoner’s narrow veins and with the quality of the drug itself.

Sentenced to execution in Tennessee, Pike remains on a ventilator and remains unconscious after surviving two lethal injections.

The execution was scheduled for Wednesday morning at the Riverbend maximum-security prison in Nashville, but the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the proceedings an hour before it began to consider arguments about Pike's childhood abuse. A few hours later, the US Supreme Court, at the request of the prosecutor's office, canceled this reprieve, allowing the execution of the sentence.