Christa Pike’s lawyer says the death row inmate remains unconscious and critically ill four days after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her.
Stephen Ferrell, an attorney for Pike, 50, said on Friday that he has been unable to see his client since she was rushed to a Nashville hospital following the botched lethal injection on September 30. “She is guarded. I’m not sure who may have seen her,” Ferrell said. “I know I have not seen her.”
Ferrell added that the state has given no indication whether it will attempt to execute Pike again. “I think one of the main things that will leave this up in the air for a while is the fact that we don’t know what the prognosis is, as in the long term prognosis,” he continued. Her legal team has warned that she “may not fully recover” even if she survives.
Court filings released after the failed execution reveal Pike suffered significant injuries to both arms and remains dependent on a ventilator to breathe. Witnesses to the execution reported that Pike began “snoring” loudly moments after receiving two doses of pentobarbital, the drug designated for lethal injection in Tennessee.
Dr. Joel Zivot of Emory University School of Medicine, who is part of Pike’s legal team, said that delayed resuscitation likely caused severe harm. “It’s very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she will have a brain injury,” Zivot said. He attributed the damage to toxins from the execution drugs that circulated while emergency care was unavailable.
Pike’s attorneys had spent three days in hearings just weeks before the execution arguing that her small, difficult-to-access veins made the procedure dangerously risky. Pike herself had expressed fear that the execution would go wrong. Her lawyers now say those warnings were ignored. “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy,” they said in a statement.
Randy Spivey, another attorney representing Pike, had acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding her case even before Ferrell’s latest comments. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” Spivey said of her condition.
Pike has been Tennessee’s only female death row inmate for three decades, held since her 1996 conviction for the murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 at the time of the killing, carried out with her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17. She was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The execution proceeded despite petitions to halt it based on Pike’s compromised veins and concerns about whether the lethal doses could properly reach her heart. Her lawyers have also cited “degraded pentobarbital” as a contributing factor to the failure.