Christa Pike remains ‘critically ill’ on ventilator as lawyers unsure she’ll recover from botched execution
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Christa Pike hasn’t regained consciousness and remains on a ventilator in hospital just four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, her attorney has said.
Little information has been released about Pike’s condition since prison officials attempted to execute her on Wednesday night with two doses of pentobarbital, which led her to be hospitalized as she survived the lethal injections with burned and blistered arms.
Pike’s lawyer, assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell, told CNN they may not know for several more days whether or not she can recover as her condition “remains the same” since she was first put in hospital.
“We don’t know right now, and we may never know what sort of torture she endured during that process, where her consciousness was, what physical pain there was — what mental torture she went through,” he said.
“She's still in the hospital on a ventilator, critically ill. We don't really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days.”
Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in 1995. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.
Asked by CNN if she’d regained consciousness after the execution attempt, he replied: “Not that I’m aware of”, adding that doctors were still trying to clear the high barbiturate dosage out of her system.
A medical power of attorney has been informing Pike’s legal team of her current state, Ferrell said, as they have not been let in to see their client.
Pike's execution was delayed for more than eight hours Wednesday as the U.S. Supreme Court considered, and ultimately overturned, a federal appeals court ruling to halt her lethal injection so judges could thoroughly review whether the jury that sentenced her to death should have considered sexual abuse she said she suffered as a child.
Her attorneys asked a court Friday to order Tennessee prison officials to preserve any written records, communication, images or video from the execution. The team are currently looking to get her sentence commuted from the death penalty to a life sentence.
Tennessee, like many other states with capital punishment, keeps many details about executions secret from the people involved to details about how the drugs are manufactured or obtained or any tests done on their quality.
“The state of Tennessee has got to start telling its people exactly what it is doing so that in the democratic process, the people of Tennessee can decide if that’s what they want to be done in their name,” Ferrell told CNN.
This wasn’t the first time the state had struggled with an execution. In May this year, prison officials were forced to stop the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff placed an IV into his right arm but couldn’t get a secondary IV line.
Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction Frank Strada announced Saturday he was resigning.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent investigation into the state's capital punishment system conducted by former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton.
He also reviewed Tennessee's execution procedures after Lee called off a different execution in 2022 and found the state did not comply with its own lethal injection process. Prison officials and the Tennessee Attorney General's Office have said little since Pike was taken to the hospital.
