
Christa Pike, the Tennessee inmate who survived two lethal injection doses, has a "long road to recovery" after the botched execution that left her unconscious for six days and hooked up to life support, her lawyer, Randy Spivey, said at a news conference.
On Tuesday, Pike woke up and started talking, but he's still not out of danger. Spivey described several health problems, including a blood clot in one arm, pneumonia, an inability to swallow and a lack of function in his arms.
“Neither we nor Christa have yet begun to understand what this means for her mental health,” Spivey said.
According to doctors, most of the pentobarbital, the drug used in the lethal injection, entered her arm instead of entering her bloodstream. The amount was enough to put her to sleep, but not to stop her heart or slow her breathing.
On Monday evening, the lawyer said Pike had become brain dead and would be taken off life support on Tuesday, but she woke up in the morning.
Spivey said she wasn't in the room when Pike woke up, but her first words were: "Where am I and who are you?"
Pike is angry, confused and wants to know what happened to her, Spivey said. He said she asked about her team and the victim's family.
However, “she is very aware that the state tried to execute her,” Spivey said.
Spivey said Pike cooperated during the attempted execution, even helping the execution team find a suitable vein for the injection.
“She was polite and well-mannered as they worked for an hour, poking her arm with needles, and then she felt the burn of the pentobarbital. Then she woke up in a hospital, surrounded by people she didn’t know, with a tube down her throat,” he said.
He added that “all of this could have been predicted and was predicted.”
“What happened to Christa is exactly what the state was warned would happen,” Spivey continued. Pike’s legal team had opposed execution by lethal injection, citing vein problems that Pike has that they say would likely cause problems during a lethal injection. The
news conference followed a status hearing in a Tennessee court on Wednesday, during which District Attorney I’Ashea L. Myles ruled that the state must preserve any evidence related to the botched execution.
The 50-year-old became the first person to survive two doses of lethal injection. She was sentenced to death for the murder of a classmate nearly three decades ago.