Christa Pike woke in hospital “angry and confused” after surviving a failed execution in Tennessee last week, her lawyer has said.
Pike’s first words after regaining consciousness were “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”according to her lawyer Randy Spivey.
The 50-year-old was subjected to two rounds of lethal injection on 30 September after being sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike was taken to hospital after the execution failed. Her lawyers said she remained unconscious for days while medical staff treated her and cleared the drugs from her system.
Spivey said her legal team had believed for days that Pike was brain dead and expected her to be taken off life support.
But she began speaking on Tuesday in what he described as a “shock to everyone.”
Pike remembers only limited details of the execution attempt, her lawyer said. She reportedly helped the execution team find a vein in her arm and was polite during the procedure.
She later woke in hospital with a breathing tube in her throat and surrounded by people she did not know.
Spivey said both of her arms were “tremendously swollen” and that she had developed a blood clot in one arm and pneumonia. She is also unable to swallow.
“We don’t know the toll all of this will take” on her mental health, Spivey said.
Pike remains in critical medical care and is being restrained by her hands and feet in her hospital bed, her lawyers said.
Her apparent survival has been described by experts and her legal team as unprecedented. Pike is believed to be the only US prisoner to survive an execution attempt involving lethal injection.
After Pike failed to die following two rounds of pentobarbital, she was taken to hospital, where she remained unconscious for several days.
Her lawyers appeared before a judge on Wednesday seeking an order requiring Tennessee to preserve evidence from the failed execution.
Judge Chancellor I’Ashea Myles ordered the state to preserve material from the execution room, including IV lines, syringes and waste such as packaging, inserts and labels.
The judge also ordered the preservation of documentation concerning Pike’s psychological condition before, during and after the execution attempt.
She warned the state to take “special care” not to lose or accidentally delete information that could be relevant to the case.
Pike’s lawyer Luke Ihnen told the court that it had been difficult to communicate with his client because she had been unconscious until Tuesday.
He asked the judge to give Pike access to a phone so she could contact her lawyers and requested continued access to her.
Ihnen also said prison officials were keeping Pike “shackled” to her hospital bed despite requests from medical staff that the restraints be removed.
He asked the court to require the Tennessee Department of Corrections to notify Pike’s legal team 48 hours before she is transferred from the hospital to another state or government-run medical facility.
The state’s Assistant Attorney General, Will Ayers, said the state was already required to preserve evidence, questioning the need for an emergency order.
Asked whether Tennessee planned to reschedule Pike’s execution, Ayers said he did not know.
Governor Bill Lee has ordered a pause on executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and said he wants answers about what went wrong. The state’s prisons chief has also announced plans to resign following the failed execution.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers.
Shipp was 17 at the time of the killing and was spared the death penalty because he was a minor. He remains in prison.
Erizia Rubyjeana
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