By Steve Gorman
Oct 6 (Reuters) – 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.
Death penalty opponents said the incident exposed the inherent barbarity of executions. It also highlighted the difficulties of carrying out lethal injections while respecting constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment.
LETHAL INJECTION GONE AWRY
Pike’s attorneys and journalists who witnessed the execution attempt described it as roughly 2-1/2 hours of disarray and prolonged distress for her as Correction Department personnel struggled to administer two doses of pentobarbital intravenously.
Pike was heard gasping, crying, whimpering and breathing loudly through much of the procedure, at one point saying, “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.”
The bungled attempt to establish intravenous lines left both of Pike’s arms “swollen, burned and blistered,” the apparent result of the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeping into the tissues under her skin, her lawyers said in court filings.
The lawyers accused state officials of having shrugged off prior warnings from Pike’s doctors that her small veins and a blood disorder would make placing IV lines especially difficult.
In the midst of the procedure, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency court motion to halt it. By then, prison officials had ceased their execution efforts and called an ambulance, according to court records.
The night of the execution attempt, the Correction Department defended its handling of the situation, saying it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol.” But agency commissioner Frank Strada has resigned and will leave his post this month, the governor announced on Saturday.
Lee had previously ordered a suspension of any scheduled executions for the rest of the year and a third-party review of what happened in Pike’s case.
30-YEAR SAGA
Two days before Pike was due to meet her fate, Lee rejected a petition seeking to commute her death penalty to a life prison term without the possibility of parole.
Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a third companion lured Slemmer into a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and killed her.
The gruesome nature of the slaying, which involved Shipp carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim’s chest and Pike bashing Slemmer in the head with a chunk of asphalt, then taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, drew intense media coverage at the time. Trial testimony indicated Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for her boyfriend’s affections.
Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, testified for the prosecution and received probation.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Daphne Psaledakis; editing by Rosalba O’Brien, Nia Williams and Chris Reese)
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