Christa Pike speaks out following botched Tennessee execution

Christa Pike, a 50-year-old death row inmate in the United States, has spoken publicly for the first time since surviving a failed lethal injection in Tennessee on September 30. In a statement released through her lawyers on Friday, October 30, Pike said she has been in constant physical and mental pain since the attempt to execute her for a 1995 murder.

A failed procedure and a slow recovery

According to The Guardian, members of the state's execution team spent almost an hour trying to set up an intravenous line before the procedure failed. Pike's lawyers say the two doses of the sedative she was given did not reach her bloodstream but collected in her arms, leaving them burned and blistered, as Al Jazeera and DW reported. The Guardian, The Hindu and DW name the drug as pentobarbital; Al Jazeera reported it as phenobarbital.

Al Jazeera and DW reported that Pike was unconscious for days after the failed execution; DW said she spent her first days in hospital on a ventilator. The Guardian reported that she received 10 days of intensive hospital treatment.

In her statement, Pike blamed the "incompetence" that had put "so many people in this terrible position". "There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain," she said, adding that her body, arms, hands and throat still hurt and that she struggles to speak. Pike, who was 18 at the time of the crime, said she had gone into the execution chamber ready to die and woke up alone and confused in a hospital bed, The Hindu reported.

Isolation and an uncertain future

After leaving hospital, Pike was returned to the infirmary of the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she is being kept largely in solitary confinement. Her lawyers have asked a federal judge to let her be with other prisoners, saying the isolation has caused "significant psychological harm and trauma", according to Al Jazeera. Pike said the isolation was its own form of pain, The Guardian reported, having spent her first 28 years on death row in solitary confinement.

Pike's lawyers have asked Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life imprisonment. Lee told reporters that he suspected her sentence would stay the same unless the courts decided otherwise. The governor has ordered an investigation into the failed execution and postponed the other lethal injection the state had scheduled this year, according to The Hindu, Al Jazeera and DW. Al Jazeera reported that Frank Strada, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, has announced his resignation.

Pike said she was grateful to the medical workers who saved her life and to the people who had shown her kindness. It is not yet clear what Tennessee intends to do with her sentence.