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Christa Pike update today: Did Tennessee death row inmate regain consciousness? Her lawyer addresses ‘torture she endured’
Christa Pike’s attorneys did not identify who is making her medical decisions, and said that “we may never know what sort of torture she endured."
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Christa Pike has remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital in the four days since her botched execution attempt in Tennessee. One of her lawyers said on Sunday, October 4, that her prognosis might not be known for days, NBC News reported.
Pike remains on a ventilator with hospital staff working to save her life and clear the pentobarbital she was administered from her system, her attorneys said, according to The Guardian. She received two doses of the drug in a failed attempt by the state of Tennessee to execute her on Wednesday, September 31.
Christa Pike update
Very little information has been released about Pike’s condition since the failed execution. On being asked if she ever regained consciousness after the execution attempt, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s lawyer, said on CNN’s State of the Union, “Not that I am aware of.”
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Pike’s attorneys did not identify who is making her medical decisions, and added that they may not know for several more days whether she can recover.
“We don’t know right now, and we may never know what sort of torture she endured during that process, where her consciousness was, what physical pain there was — what mental torture she went through,” Ferrell said.
A spokeswoman for Pike’s defense team said in a statement on Sunday that “we appreciate all respect for Christa’s rightful privacy.”
Pike’s attorneys stated in a court filing that they believed problems with intravenous lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
“Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body,” they wrote.
They added that instead of “remedying this failure,” the execution team went on to prepare and administer a backup set of pentobarbital syringes.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 in connection with the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 20 at the time.
Pike and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, murdered Slemmer at a job training camp in Knoxville, Tennessee. Shocking details about the case shocked the United States, including the fact that a pentagram had been carved into Slemmer’s chest.
The Death Penalty Information Center states that the last execution of a woman in Tennessee was in 1820. This means Pike would have been the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.
