Christa Pike’s lawyers have revealed the Tennessee death row inmate’s first words after waking up from her botched execution.
Pike, 50, was set to be put to death last Wednesday, but she survived two lethal injections at Riverbend maximum security prison in Nashville. She was then taken to a hospital and placed on a ventilator.
Her lawyers said at a press conference outside of court Wednesday that she appeared to be brain dead Monday and would be taken off life support the next day.
“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey, said.
When asked what Pike’s first words were when she woke up, Spivey said, “Our understanding was the first thing she said was, ‘Where am I and who are you?’”
Spivey said that while Pike is experiencing “a lot of cognitive confusion,” he said she is “very aware that the state tried to execute her.”
He described Pike’s emotions right now as “angry and confused.”
Pike was sentenced to death after the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was just 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed their classmate Slemmer, who prosecutors said Pike feared was a romantic rival.
Supporters of Christa believe the death penalty is an unfair punishment given her age and the mental state she was in after years of sexual abuse. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years if the lethal injections worked.
“Christa is a survivor. She survived child sexual abuse. She survived rapes of multiple men. She survived a suicide attempt when she was 12, and she survived the state's attempt to execute her,” Spivey said. “She deserves answers about what was done to her, and the people of Tennessee deserve those answers too.”
Her lawyers were in court Wednesday over a motion for the state to preserve evidence in relation to the botched execution, which was granted.
Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles said the state should save recordings, witness accounts, emails, drugs, syringes, IV lines and any other medical items.
Spivey said Pike “was at peace” before the execution and was “kind and polite” as the team administering the two doses of the drug “worked for an hour, stabbing her arm with needle after needle, and then she felt the burn of the pinobarbitol.
“And then she woke up in a hospital, surrounded by people she didn't know with a tube down her throat.”
Pentobarbital slows the activity of the brain and nervous system and is often used by doctors to treat people suffering from seizures and convulsions. In high doses, it can cause suppression of breathing, heart failure and death.
Spivey said Pike has “a long road to recovery.”
“She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she is not eaten.
“She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen, and we do not know what, if any, function she will regain in her arms,” her lawyer said.
Republican Governor Bill Lee has called what happened “deeply disturbing” and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.”
Spivey has continued to ask Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence.
“After all we have seen and all that we still do not know, it is unimaginable that the state would try to execute her again,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
