NASHVILLE (The Thursday Times) — Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row prisoner who survived a botched lethal injection a month ago, said on Friday that she remains in constant pain and condemned the “incompetence” behind her failed execution, in her first public comments since that night.
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” Pike, 50, said in a statement released by her lawyers. “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 was strapped to a gurney in Tennessee’s execution chamber on September 30 and injected with pentobarbital after members of the execution team spent almost an hour trying to set up an intravenous line. She survived and spent about 10 days in intensive hospital treatment, where her lawyers said she developed pneumonia, severe swelling in her arms and could not swallow. She is thought to be the only person to have survived an execution attempt by lethal injection.
“I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” she said, adding that she woke up “alone in a hospital confused and in pain”. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next.” She is being held in the infirmary of a Nashville prison, largely in isolation, she said.
Governor Bill Lee has paused executions pending an outside review, but said this week that he expected her death sentence to stand unless the courts decide otherwise. Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend tortured and killed when Pike was 18. Her co-accused, Tadaryl Shipp, was spared the death penalty because he was a juvenile.
