Christa Pike, the 50-year-old convicted murderer who survived a lethal injection attempt in Tennessee last week, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her attorneys announced overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, nearly a week after her execution ended with her being taken from prison in an ambulance rather than a coffin.
“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking and continues to receive critical medical care,” her attorneys said. Despite severe damage to her arms during efforts to establish intravenous access, they said, Pike remains shackled by her hands and feet to her hospital bed.
“Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear, but at a minimum we expect a lengthy rehabilitation,” the attorneys added.
As recently as Sunday, Pike’s legal team said she remained unconscious and on a ventilator. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and surgeon who has advised her legal team, told the Associated Press that her ability to speak was encouraging, but warned that it could take weeks or months before doctors understand the full extent of the damage.
Pike is no longer on a ventilator but remains in intensive care and is still considered medically at risk, he said.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 at the time and, according to the court record, went with her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and another young woman, Shadolla Peterson, to a wooded area near the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.
Prosecutors said Pike feared that Slemmer was interested in Shipp. Pike and Shipp attacked and killed her while Peterson reportedly acted as a lookout. At trial, evidence showed that Pike slashed Slemmer more than 100 times with a box cutter and struck her with a large piece of asphalt, while Shipp carved a pentagram into her body. Pike also took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir.
Pike and Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp received a life sentence.
Two supposedly lethal doses, but she kept breathing
Pike was scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years on Sept. 30.
She was strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, and the execution team began administering pentobarbital, the drug Tennessee uses for lethal injections. But something went wrong.
Despite receiving two doses intended to be fatal, Pike continued breathing for more than an hour. Witnesses heard her groaning and snoring, and at one point she complained, “My arm feels like it’s going to explode.”
According to court filings by her attorneys, the execution team used at least seven needles while trying to find a suitable vein. One needle reportedly emerged from her arm bent at roughly a 90-degree angle.
Both of Pike’s arms were left swollen, burned and blistered. Her attorneys argue that the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, leaked from the IV into tissue beneath the skin instead of entering her bloodstream properly.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled to the prison last week to witness the execution. After it failed, she said she had not received justice for her daughter.
“I watched the whole thing. She was awake. That wasn’t justice for Colleen,” Martinez said.
Pike’s lawyers also argue that authorities ignored advance warnings from doctors that she had small veins and a blood disorder that could complicate intravenous access.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has maintained that its personnel “followed all steps of the state’s lawful and approved execution protocol,” but has not yet publicly explained why the execution failed.
In the aftermath, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee halted the state’s remaining executions scheduled for this year and ordered a comprehensive external review.
Tennessee correction commissioner Frank Strada also announced over the weekend that he would resign and leave his post this month. Strada continued to insist that prison officials had followed procedures, but said his departure was “in the best interest of the people of Tennessee” while the independent investigation continues.
Can Tennessee try to execute her again?
Pike’s survival now raises an almost unprecedented legal question: Can Tennessee attempt to execute her a second time?
She is believed to be the first known person in the United States to survive after the drugs intended to carry out an execution were actually administered. Previous executions have been called off when teams were unable to establish intravenous access, but in Pike’s case the state went through the lethal injection protocol and she remained alive.
Legal experts are divided over whether another attempt would be constitutional.
Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno told AP that Pike could have substantial arguments that a second attempt would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, and could also raise concerns under protections against double jeopardy.
(Photo: Tennessee Department of Correction/Handout via REUTERS)
Other legal experts, however, have suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court could find that Pike’s sentence is death and, because that sentence has not yet been carried out, the failed attempt does not necessarily bar the state from trying again.
Pike’s attorneys have meanwhile asked a Davidson County court to order Tennessee to preserve all evidence connected to the failed execution, including needles and syringes, the production details of the pentobarbital, correspondence, documents and records involving the execution team.
They say the material could be used in future litigation alleging that Pike’s constitutional rights were violated and that she was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Her attorneys are also continuing to urge Gov. Lee to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Pike’s 1996 sentence made her one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the United States. Her attorneys and supporters have since argued that the punishment was excessive because she committed the crime at a very young age and suffered from untreated mental illness following a childhood marked by severe neglect and sexual abuse, including rapes at ages 11 and 17.
She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Her current attorney, Stephen Ferrell, has argued that Pike’s trial lawyers failed during the sentencing phase to present jurors with critical information about her background or ask them to give sufficient weight to her youth.
Ferrell has also pointed to advances in understanding adolescent brain development and to the different sentence imposed on Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the murder and received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole because of his age.