Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row prisoner who survived an execution attempt in September, has spoken publicly for the first time about her continuing pain and recovery. Her legal team published the statement on social media on Friday, October 30, as questions remained unanswered about why the procedure failed.
Pike, 50, said she had experienced unrelenting pain since the execution attempt, describing discomfort in her body, arms, hands and throat, along with difficulty speaking. She also described emotional suffering. Although she felt she was becoming stronger during her recovery, she said: “But healing is not the same as being okay.”
Two lethal injections of pentobarbital left Pike critically ill. She was discharged from hospital at the end of September and returned to the prison where she has spent the past 30 years for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Her lawyers previously reported that she had developed pneumonia after the execution attempt, suffered considerable swelling in her arms and been unable to swallow.
Pike is believed to be the only person to survive an attempted execution by lethal injection. In her statement, she said she had not expected to live beyond the night of the procedure. She also expressed distress over what she described as incompetence and the situation it had created for those involved.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has defended its execution method but has not explained why the attempt failed. The department declined to comment on Pike's statement when approached by the BBC. Governor Bill Lee suspended executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review to establish what happened.
Asked by reporters this week about the possibility of another attempt to execute Pike, Lee indicated that he expected her sentence to remain unchanged unless the courts decided otherwise. Pike had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Pike was 18 when she and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed Slemmer, who was 19. They had met her at a job training camp serving young people from low-income backgrounds. Shipp was not legally an adult when the killing occurred and was spared the death penalty. He remains incarcerated.
Pike's lawyers have pursued appeals for decades. In the days before the scheduled execution, both the US Supreme Court and Lee declined to intervene to stop it.
