▶ Watch Video: What Christa Pike asked when she woke up from failed execution
Christa Pike‘s attorneys said she had pneumonia, a blood clot, couldn’t swallow, and was unable to move her arms or hands once she regained consciousness in a Tennessee hospital, days after the death row inmate survived a botched execution by the state.
Pike on Wednesday began “taking limited steps” with help, according to her team. And on Thursday, her attorneys detailed more progress, saying in a statement that she was walking “with some assistance,” and her arms were “healing and regaining movement and strength.” They also said that her “lungs are clear, and she has started to eat a regular diet.”
But they previously cautioned that the lethal drugs she received may have lasting consequences for her mobility.
“Her hands looked like if you were to blow up a surgical glove,” one of Pike’s attorneys, Randy Spivey, told reporters at a Wednesday news conference. “It was extraordinary.”
Spivey said he and Pike’s other attorneys were told she was brain-dead on Monday and expected her to be removed from life support. But by the next day, she had woken up and started talking, he said.
The attorney said it was his understanding that Pike’s first words were, “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”
“I don’t have an explanation for what happened,” Spivey told reporters after a hearing at Davidson County Chancery Court. He said that Pike was confused and disoriented at first, but she began to remember details of the execution attempt on Wednesday.
In addition to the lung infection, a blood clot in her arm, and an issue swallowing that had prevented her from eating, Pike’s arms and hands are “tremendously swollen,” said Spivey, adding that “we don’t know what function she will regain.”
Another attorney for Pike, Steve Ferrell, described her cognition as “foggy” and told CBS News partner BBC News on Thursday that she could suffer “permanent damage,” although he said that he hasn’t personally seen her since she was hospitalized.
Her attorneys said in their news release Thursday that she is experiencing “cognitive challenges with concentration and memory.”
Pike is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Court grants request for evidence
Before Pike’s attorneys shared updates on her health outside of the Davidson County court on Wednesday, they attended an emergency hearing in which they requested Tennessee’s correctional department to preserve records and other evidence of her failed lethal injection.
Chancellor I’Ashea Myles granted the order and said the state would be mandated to preserve “relevant evidence” of its failed attempt to put Pike to death on Sept. 30, including “drugs, IV lines, needles, catheters, medical supplies, restraints, gurneys” and anything else in the execution chamber at the time of the procedure.
Myles said waste, such as packing supplies and labels, and all written or digital records, including records of communication through encrypted platforms, witness accounts, and correspondence regarding equipment or drug administration issues, must be preserved, too.
She explicitly directed the state “not to lose, misplace, accidentally delete, any information that may be pertinent to this litigation.”
“To any extent that any information or any evidence has already been discarded, deleted, destroyed or no longer exists, I want [the Tennessee Department of Correction] to take an affirmative step to try to claw back that information and put in policies and procedures, while this incident litigation is pending, to ensure that no information is discarded or destroyed,” said Myles.
Execution aftermath
Staff had given Pike, 50, two doses of a lethal injection drug, but her legal team confirmed shortly after the failed procedure that, in an unprecedented turn, she was alive and had been hospitalized. Her legal team said on Tuesday that she had regained consciousness and was speaking from her hospital bed.
Pike’s attorneys also said Tuesday she was continuing “to receive critical medical care” as hospital workers attempted to clear her system of the lethal drug pentobarbital. Her prognosis remained unclear, they added, but she was expected to face, at minimum, “a long recovery.”
The legal team has renewed its calls for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence, pushing him to change the sentence to life in prison without parole so that the state can’t attempt to execute Pike a second time, which is the usual course of action after an inmate survives botched execution proceedings. However, while others have survived botched procedures before, Pike is the only known inmate in the United States’ modern death penalty era to remain alive after actually receiving lethal chemicals.
“The state has made no promises that Ms. Pike will not be subject to a future execution,” Luke Ihnen, one of Pike’s attorneys, said in court on Wednesday. Evidence sought by the defense for the correctional department to preserve could help them build future arguments to prevent that from happening, Ihnen added.
Will Ayers, the assistant attorney general for the state of Tennessee, told the court that there’s no pending execution order for Pike, and “there is no allegation that one is coming.”
Attorneys for Pike had filed an emergency motion Friday asking that the correctional department be required to “preserve all relevant physical, written and electronic evidence” of the failed execution, which, they said, amounted to “evidence of TDOC [Tennessee Department of Correction] inflicting a cruel and unusual punishment on Ms. Pike through its deliberate indifference to her basic medical needs and reckless disregard of basic medical practices and their own lethal injection protocol.”
They accused correctional staff tasked with handling Pike’s execution of failing to properly establish an IV line through which to administer lethal drugs, and then failing to realize she had a “blown vein,” allegedly allowing pentobarbital to spread through her body and causing a painful, botched procedure. In court, Ihnen also referenced the secrecy that shrouds execution protocols and proceedings in Tennessee and elsewhere across the U.S., which makes arguing death penalty cases particularly challenging.
“We don’t know what they have, because they won’t tell us,” Ihnen said in court. “And so the preservation order seeks the broadest possible preservation of evidence.”
Case history
Lee had denied Pike’s request for a commuted sentence before her execution date last week, rejecting her clemency petition in the days leading up to it. In its aftermath, he canceled the one remaining execution scheduled to take place in Tennessee by the end of the year and said an investigation would be conducted to determine what went wrong. The now-former Tennessee correctional commissioner stepped down from his post, although an official statement from the agency claimed it had followed protocols.
Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court filings show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, slashing her with a meat cleaver and box cutter for up to an hour in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, with help from her boyfriend and a friend.
When Slemmer’s body was found, she had pentagrams carved into her forehead and chest, and a piece of her skull was missing. Other students later told investigators that Pike had bragged about removing the piece of skull and revealed to at least one person that she’d kept it as a “souvenir.”
Pike spent more than three decades on Tennessee’s death row. As the only woman awaiting execution in the state for a vast majority of that time, she was alone for almost the entirety of her incarceration. She was the first woman Tennessee attempted to execute in more than 200 years and the first person the state attempted to execute in modern times for a crime they committed at age 18, 19 or 20.
Prior to Pike’s botched injection, her case had garnered public interest as human rights leaders and advocacy groups rallied against her death sentence, raising issues with her age at the time of her conviction and long history of mental illness and childhood abuse. But those who strongly support her execution, including prosecutors and jurors in Pike’s original trial as well as judges who presided over that case and many of her appeals, have countered that capital punishment is warranted given the horrific nature of her crime. Among them is Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez.
