WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) – Christa Pike, who survived a Tennessee attempt to execute her by lethal injection last week, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
Despite severe injuries to her arms, Pike, 50, is “still handcuffed and shackled to the bed,” where she “continues to receive critical medical care,” her team of public defense attorneys wrote.
Pike, sentenced to death for her role in the torture-murder of a schoolmate three decades ago, survived a botched execution attempt on the night of September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital, and has been hospitalized since then.
The episode capped a 30-year saga that began with the murder of a 19-year-old vocational student, Colleen Slemmer, by an emotionally troubled classmate whose punishment, her lawyers say, failed to account for her own childhood trauma as the victim of sexual abuse, neglect and untreated mental illness.
Pike went from being the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death in more than 200 years to becoming the first person in the United States known to have survived after execution drugs were administered.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Daphne Psaledakis; editing by Michelle Nichols and Rosalba O’Brien)
