Christa Pike, the woman who survived an execution attempt in Tennessee earlier this week, is on a ventilator while receiving treatment in a hospital, her lawyers said in a new statement Friday.
“Christa remains seriously ill and is receiving medical treatment for the devastating effects of the events of Wednesday evening,” the lawyers said in their statement. “She is critically ill, unconscious, intubated and receiving respiratory support via a ventilator.”
The statement said she is being treated for “serious effects of pentobarbital administered during the attempted execution, including significant injuries to both arms.”
The state of Tennessee attempted to put Pike to death Wednesday night by lethal injection for a murder she committed when she was 18 years old. She has been on death row for decades and would have been the first woman executed in the state in 200 years.
But she survived two fatal doses of the drug and was rushed to hospital, where she has been ever since.
Pike’s attorneys, Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen, detailed his condition in a new filing Friday. He calls on the state to preserve all evidence of the failed execution attempt.
In a statement, they said the filing “details serious complications that arose during the attempted execution, which Christa and her attorneys had warned the state and courts about months earlier.”
At a news conference Thursday, Ferrell and another Pike attorney, Randall Spivey, detailed how the attempted execution went wrong. Spivey, who was in the room, recalled Pike saying she was in pain and felt like her arm was about to “explode.”
The filing adds that the process “lasted more than two hours and Pike’s legal team filed emergency motions to stay the execution in multiple courts before the jail called an ambulance.”
“Even then,” the text continues, “attorneys for the State of Tennessee argued that TDOC had no duty to provide life-saving care to Ms. Pike.”
NBC News earlier reported that there was no emergency medical oxygen in the execution room in case something went wrong. Medical professionals had to retrieve it elsewhere.
Pike was convicted in the 1995 murder case. She and two other teenage accomplices worked together to torture, slash and beat Colleen Slemmer to death, Knoxville police said at the time. Pike was sentenced to death. A number of last-minute legal efforts to prevent Pike’s execution failed.
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