US death row inmate Christa Pike is “conscious and speaking” after surviving a failed execution attempt in Tennessee last week, her lawyers say.
Pike, 50, continues to receive critical medical care while “handcuffed and shackled to the bed” in hospital, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
Pike, who was sentenced to death after murdering Colleen Slemmer with her then-boyfriend in 1995, survived two failed lethal injections last Wednesday in Tennessee.
She was taken to hospital, where she remained unconscious for days as medical staff cleared her body of the injected chemical. Experts and her legal team say her apparent recovery is unprecedented.
Pike is believed to be the only person to survive a lethal injection.
Her lawyers said her prognosis remained unclear, but that “at a minimum, we expect a long recovery”.
Deborah Denno, a criminologist and professor at Fordham Law School, said she was “absolutely astonished” that Pike was conscious and speaking.
There had been seven other cases where prisoners survived executions but in those cases, executioners were not able to inject anything into the inmates’ veins, Denno told the BBC.
Pike “is the only person for whom some kind of toxin has been injected”, she said.
“They did everything they were supposed to do as part of the execution process, and it simply didn’t work,” Denno said. “This has never happened before.”
Speaking to Radio 4’s Today programme, a local journalist who witnessed the attempted execution said that he, too, did not know of “an exact precedent”.
Steven Hale, a journalist for the Nashville Banner, said the case raised many questions, including “what must this be like for the victim’s family, who for 30 years has been told we are gonna give you justice and justice is us executing Christa Pike”.
