Christa Pike has woken up and is speaking one week on from her botched execution, according to a new statement by her lawyers.
On September 30, she was given two doses of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the drug meant to end her life. According to media witnesses watching from a separate room, the curtains to the execution chamber were opened at around 7:27 p.m., revealing Pike strapped to a gurney.
Before the lethal injections were administered, she made a final statement, saying she was “going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love,” according to AP reporter Kim Chandler. She added that she had love for “the people who were out here hating on her.”
In a truly shocking turn of events, however, she survived the injections, and was subsequently rushed to a hospital in Nashville.
For days she lay unconscious and was kept breathing by a ventilator.
On Tuesday, October 7, her legal team shared the first sign that her condition had improved. Their statement opened with the words: “Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking.”
According to her attorneys, Pike’s arms were badly damaged during the failed execution. Even so, she remains handcuffed and shackled to her bed. Her lawyers say no one knows yet how well she will recover, and she continues to receive critical care.
Nor is it clear if the State of Tennessee will make another attempt to execute her, since she remains on death row as her sentence wasn’t carried out.
Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996, becoming the youngest woman on death row in modern U.S. history, is believed to be the only person to survive a lethal injection.
Deborah Denno, a criminologist and professor at Fordham Law School, told the BBC that she was “absolutely astonished” Pike was conscious and speaking.
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.”
Denno had previously told New York Post: “She can’t be executed if she is brain injured and doesn’t understand the proceedings.”
“The United States Supreme Court recognized in a case involving a dementia patient in 2019 that you can’t execute someone who’s not aware of the punishment that they’re going to receive.”
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