Christa Pike suffers from pneumonia and her arms no longer work after failed execution, lawyer says

Christa Pike has a “long road to recovery” after a failed Tennessee execution attempt left her unconscious and on life support for six days, her attorney, Randy Spivey, said at a news conference Wednesday.

In a miraculous development, Pike woke up and began speaking on Tuesday, but she is far from out of the woods. Spivey described several medical problems, including a blood clot in his arm, pneumonia, the inability to swallow and a lack of function in his arms.

“Neither we nor Christa have even begun to understand what this means for her mental health,” Spivey said.

Pike, 50, became the first person to survive two doses of a lethal injection after Tennessee attempted to execute her last week for the murder of a classmate three decades ago.

Doctors told NBC News it appeared most of the pentobarbital — the drug used in the lethal injection — had entered his arm rather than his bloodstream, having enough potency to put him to sleep but not to stop his heart or slow his breathing.

On Monday evening, Spivey said his understanding was that Pike was brain dead. The life support system was to be removed Tuesday, he said.

“But on Tuesday, much to the surprise of everyone, including me, including her team and the medical team, Christa woke up and started talking,” Spivey said. “I have no explanation for what happened between Monday evening and Tuesday morning.”

While Spivey said he wasn’t in the room when Pike woke up, he said the first thing she said was, “Where am I and who are you?”

Pike is angry and confused and wants to know what happened to him, Spivey said. He said she asked about his team and the victim’s family.

Still, “she is very aware that the state tried to execute her,” Spivey said.

Spivey said Pike was cooperative during the execution attempt, even helping the execution team find a good vein for his IV.

“She was kind and polite as they worked for an hour, stabbing her arm with one needle after another, then she felt the burn of the pentobarbital, then she woke up in a hospital surrounded by people she didn’t know with a tube down her throat,” he said.

He added that “all of this was predictable and expected.”

“What happened to Christa is exactly what the state was warned about,” Spivey continued. Pike’s legal team had opposed execution by lethal injection, citing venous problems that Pike had likely to cause problems during a lethal injection.

The news conference followed a status hearing in Tennessee court on Wednesday, during which Chancellor I’Ashea L. Myles ruled that the state must preserve all relevant evidence in connection with the failed execution.

“Today’s hearing is just the first step of many to preserve and uphold Christa’s constitutional rights after this unprecedented botched execution,” one of the attorneys, Luke Ihnen, said at a news conference after court Wednesday.

“As I have said repeatedly, we have not asked the State to provide any evidence at this point,” he continued. “Just demanding that they preserve it so that his lawyers, his experts and the public can know what really happened Wednesday night.” »

During the trial, Ihnen argued that “the State has made no promise that Miss Pike would not be subject to our future execution, and the evidence we seek to preserve now is relevant to any future challenge she makes.”

Myles ultimately ruled in favor of Pike’s team, stating that Tennessee must preserve all relevant evidence, including but not limited to: IV lines and needles, medical supplies and records, all medications used with anything from the manufacturer, photographs, video recordings, handwritten notes, checklists and all testimony.

“The state will have no problem doing this because you all are already doing it,” Myles said. She said if something has already been deleted, the state must work to “recover that information” and ensure in the future that no further information is discarded or destroyed.

Additionally, Ihnen asked Myles to order that the Tennessee Department of Corrections give his team 48 hours’ notice before moving Pike, to remove her shackles while she is in a hospital bed and to give her access to a phone or tablet.

He also requested that the legal team receive regular visits with Pike, noting that they had to wait in the hospital lobby for two and a half hours when they tried to see her on Tuesday.

Pike was to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. She has been on death row for more than 30 years for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. It remains unclear what his future might look like and whether the state will attempt to execute him again.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee insisted in the hours after the Sept. 30 execution attempt that the team — whose members’ identities are shrouded in secrecy — had followed state protocol. But days later, he announced that the state’s top prison official, Frank Strada, would resign this month.

In a statement, Strada said he believed the state Department of Corrections carried out its responsibilities “in accordance with established protocol.” But withdrawing, he added, was in “the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward.”

Lee also ordered an independent review of the failed execution and suspended all executions in the state for the rest of the year.

Pike’s lethal injection was the second failed lethal injection in the state this year. Tony Carruthers’ execution in May was halted after the state Department of Corrections struggled to find a vein to install a backup injection line.