Ammon News - Convicted killer Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee's effort to execute her by lethal injection last week, foiling the state's ​first attempt to put a woman to death in two centuries, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.

Despite severe injuries to her ‌arms from the insertion of intravenous lines during the aborted execution last Wednesday, Pike, 50, is "still handcuffed and shackled" to her hospital bed while she remains under medical care, her team of public defense attorneys wrote.

"Her prognosis remains unclear, but at a minimum we expect a long recovery," the lawyers' statement said, adding that a court hearing on Pike's case was scheduled for Wednesday in Davidson County Chancery Court.

The hearing pertains to her lawyers' request for a court order to preserve evidence from the ​failed execution they said would show the Tennessee Department of Correction violated Pike's constitutional rights by subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment, a spokesperson said.

She was not expected to appear ​for the proceeding.

Pike, sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture-murder of 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer three decades ago, survived the execution attempt ⁠on the night of September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital. She has been hospitalized since then.

Her lawyers said on Friday their client remained unconscious, critically ill and hooked to ​a ventilator to breathe, as doctors labored to clear the drug pentobarbital from her system.

"Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking and continues to receive critical medical care," they wrote on Tuesday.

Pike's petition for ​clemency, denied last week by Republican Governor Bill Lee, argued her death sentence had failed to properly account for Pike's own childhood trauma as the victim of sexual abuse, neglect and untreated mental illness.

Long the only woman on death row in the state, Pike also has endured nearly 30 years of solitary confinement, her lawyers say.
Pike went from being the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death since the early 19th century to becoming the first person in the United States ​known to have survived after execution drugs were administered.


Reuters