Christa Pike, the woman who survived two lethal injections at the maximum security Riverbend prison in Nashville, has regained consciousness and is speaking. His lawyers made this known, calling it an “unprecedented” development.
Pike, according to what her lawyers reported, remains handcuffed and chained at the ankles despite having suffered serious injuries to her arms due to the pentobarbital drips that should have killed her.
Because she was convicted
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate of hers in Knoxville’s Job Corps job training program, when she was 18. The crime was linked to a romantic rivalry. Her two accomplices — her boyfriend at the time, 17, and another 18-year-old girl — avoided the death penalty. The first was sentenced to life imprisonment, while the second obtained a suspended sentence in exchange for her testimony against the other two.
In these thirty years there have been many requests for mercy made by NGOs and human rights associations, both in consideration of the young age at which Pike committed the crime and for her psychological conditions (in prison she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder).
Execution failed
The woman was hospitalized on the evening of September 30 after the flop of the execution in the death chamber of the maximum security Riverbend prison in Nashville.
The prognosis for Christa remains unclear at the moment: “At a minimum we should expect a long recovery time. We are incredibly grateful to the medical team at the hospital who treated Christa exceptionally well,” said lawyers Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason.