Christa Pike has woken up and begun speaking from her hospital bed almost a week after her failed execution in Tennessee, her lawyers said, per the BBC. Experts and her lawyers have said that the new development is “medically unprecedented”
Pike’s attorneys said in a statement on Tuesday, October 6, that she remains handcuffed and shackled despite having sustained significant injuries to her arms after two injections of pentobarbital failed to kill her, NBC News reported.
They previously stated in a court filing that they believed problems with intravenous lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
“If the investigation identifies problems with how the protocol was implemented the state may focus on correcting those procedures,” he said. “The US Supreme Court has not decided whether a second execution attempt would violate the constitution since 1947,” she told USA Today. Jones said that litigation is expected to proceed in both state and federal court. “They will likely pursue stuff on a dual avenue approach, both through the federal court system and the state court system,” Jones added. “We continue to ask the Governor of Tennessee to commute Christa Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” they said. “Maybe [that’s] a decision that would go up to the United States Supreme Court,” she said. “We certainly have seen a couple of instances of an inmate who has survived to be executed finally again.”
“If officials followed the protocol as written and the execution nevertheless failed, that could raise more fundamental questions about the protocol itself. Either way, I would expect the circumstances surrounding Ms Pike’s failed execution to receive significant scrutiny before Tennessee resumes executions. Knoxville attorney T. Scott Jones, senior partner at Banks and Jones Attorneys, weighed in on the next steps before Pike regained consciousness. “I mean, at some point in time, the courts are going to have to make that decision with regards to her competence and also to whether or not that under the Eighth Amendment, this basically constitutes cruel and inhumane punishment.
