Death row inmate Christa Pike has revealed what she remembers of her botched execution attempt in her first words after losing consciousness during the ordeal last week.
Pike, 50, woke up on Tuesday, October 6, but remains in critical condition after being injected with two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital.
The Tennessee inmate’s legal team confirmed she was awake and able to speak after spending nearly a week unconscious.
Pike is still in critical condition and remains handcuffed to her hospital bed despite suffering from severe damage to her arms after she was struck with at least seven needles during her failed execution, her attorneys said.
“Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” her legal team said on Tuesday.
Dr Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist advising her team, told The Sun on Wednesday that Pike had been taken off the ventilator and gave insight into her current condition.
“She’s breathing on her own, I think she’s on some supplemental oxygen, but not what she required initially.
“She’s talking, she apparently knows at least who she is, and now knows where she is.
“She does not have any memory of the execution itself, but does have some memory of at least being a patient in the hospital on a ventilator.”
Zivot said it was too early to say whether memories of the execution could come back to Pike and if she could recover to her former self.
The expert said her condition will play a big role in her future, but it’s also still to early to understand the extent of her possible injuries.
“If Christa Pike returns to her normal neurologic self – that is to know who she is, where she is and what she’s done – then she certainly faces the prosect of another attempt at executing her,” he explained.
The 50-year-old was scheduled to be executed on September 30, where if had it been successful, Pike would have been the first woman in the state to be executed in over 200 years.
Before she woke, her attorney Stephen Ferrell told CNN’s Jake Tapper there was a looming question about what she felt during the failed execution.
“We don’t know right now, and we may never know, what sort of torture she endured during that process,” he said.
Pike sat on death row for 30 years for the 1995 murder of her 19-year-old college classmate Colleen Slemmer, whom she tortured, bludgeoned, carved a pentagram into, and took part of her skull as a souvenir.
Last Wednesday, Pike received two supposedly lethal doses of the drug pentobarbital at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
But she was still alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and was rushed to the hospital, where she had been unconscious and on a ventilator in critical condition.
May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, spoke out soon after the news that Pike was awake broke, saying she knew all along that Pike would not die. PoliticalNews Analysis
Martinez also said she doesn’t believe the state will try to execute her daughter’s murderer again.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” she told NBC affiliate WBIR when asked about her preference for the next outcome.
“They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”