Christa Pike describes constant pain after failed Tennessee execution

Christa Pike says she has been in pain every moment since she survived a lethal injection in Tennessee a month ago, describing physical suffering and mental anguish in her first public statement since the failed execution.

“Several days later I woke up alone in a hospital confused and in pain,” Pike said in a statement dictated to her lawyers and released Friday. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”

Pike, 50, said she had entered the execution chamber on Sept. 30 prepared to die. “I had not contemplated life beyond that night,” she said. Instead, she survived and was taken to a hospital.

The Guardian reported that execution team members spent almost an hour trying to establish an intravenous line before Pike received 5 grams of the sedative pentobarbital. CBS News reported that she was given two doses of a lethal injection drug. According to CBS News, a media witness heard Pike snoring loudly about an hour after the procedure began, and she was later taken by ambulance to a hospital.

“I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” Pike said. Her failed execution has raised questions about Tennessee’s lethal injection procedures. CBS News said its review of state protocols dating to 2007 found they had grown increasingly vague.

The Guardian reported that Gov. Bill Lee has paused further executions pending an outside review. Lee said earlier this week that he expected Pike’s death sentence to remain in place unless a court ruled otherwise, according to the newspaper.

Pike was convicted in 1995 of murdering her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court filings show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, using a meat cleaver and box cutter, with help from her boyfriend and a friend, CBS News reported.

The failed procedure was the second execution problem in Tennessee this year, according to CBS News. The execution of Tony Carruthers was halted after team members spent more than an hour trying to establish an IV line, and the governor granted him a one-year reprieve. Pike is the only person known to have survived a U.S. execution attempt after the drug was administered, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, as cited by CBS News. A Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this month found that one-third of Americans support a second attempt to execute her, CBS News reported.

After 10 days of intensive hospital treatment, Pike returned to the infirmary at Nashville’s Debra Johnson rehabilitation center, The Guardian reported. She said she is being kept largely apart from others, an isolation she described as painful after spending her first 28 years on death row in solitary confinement.

Pike thanked the medical workers who cared for her and said support from people around the world has helped her. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next,” she said. “For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time.”