Christa Pike ‘angry, confused’ and unable to move arms after failed execution, lawyers say

Christa Pike awoke “angry and confused” after surviving two lethal injections, her attorneys said on Wednesday, as a judge ordered Tennessee state officials to preserve all evidence related to the failed execution.

Pike, 50, was taken to hospital unconscious but alive from Tennessee’s execution chamber last Wednesday after two supposedly lethal doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital.

She was declared brain dead on Monday, her attorneys said, and her team was informed of plans to remove her from life support the next day. “But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone … Christa woke up and began talking,” Randy Spivey, one of her lawyers, said at a press conference on Wednesday. He was told her first words were “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”

Pike remains hospitalized and shackled to her bed, despite pleas from medical staff for prison officials to remove her restraints, her lawyers said. She has pneumonia, a blood clot, and is unable to move either of her badly injured arms, they added.

“There’s still a lot of cognitive confusion, and so I will say that she has wanted to know what’s happened, and she’s asked about several people,” Spivey said. “She’s asked about her team. She’s asked about the victim’s family … I think she is angry and confused about everything right now.”

The update on Pike’s condition came after a contentious court hearing in Nashville, where judge I’Ashea Myles ordered the state to preserve “anything that was in the actual room” during the attempted execution a week ago.

Pike’s legal team accused Tennessee officials of “secreting away” evidence. Attorney Luke Ihnen said items from the attempted execution could be key to future legal challenges by Pike, should the state attempt to kill her again.

“The state has made no promises that Ms Pike will not be subject to a future execution, and the evidence that we are seeking to preserve now is relevant for any future challenge that she makes, because as we pled in January, the same thing is likely to happen,” Ihnen said.

Pike, believed to be the only person to survive a lethal injection, was injected with large doses of the sedative when Tennessee officials had attempted to put her to death, in a case that shocked many in the US and created headlines around the world.

At the press conference on Wednesday, Spivey said it was unclear “what if any function” Pike would regain in her arms. “Her hands look like if you were to blow up a surgical glove,” Spivey said.

Despite her condition, Pike was still being restrained, her team said, shackled to her hospital bed by her feet and right arm.

“Based on our understanding, medical staff have asked that the shackles be removed and have been denied that request [by the Tennessee correction department],” he told Myles earlier. He added: “We would also amend our request and ask for that relief.”

Witnesses to the attempted execution of Pike described how they heard her breathing raggedly after receiving the first injection. She was then hospitalized after a second dose failed to kill her and was declared to be in critical condition.

After the botched execution attempt, 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”. Pike had lifted her head from the execution gurney to say her arms were burning as the drug was administered.

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.

There is speculation from medical experts that perhaps some or a lot of the drug missed her vein and went into tissue, that one of her veins, which were problematic and this fact flagged by her lawyers months earlier – blew, or that the drug was faulty, or a combination.

Pike was 18 and her then boyfriend 17 at the time when they killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps, in Tennessee in 1995.

According to prosecutors, Pike was worried Slemmer was trying to take the boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, away from her. Together, they lured Slemmer into a wooded area, tortured and killed her.

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 but, because she was 18, she was sentenced to death and has been on death row, isolated, for 30 years.