Christa Pike marked one month since her botched execution by Tennessee and released a statement lamenting the “incompetence” that led to this moment, adding that despite ongoing recovery, she remains in constant physical pain and mental anguish.
In comments released Friday by her legal team, the prisoner said there had not been a time since she was injected with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital that she had not felt pain. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still have trouble speaking. And the pain is not just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said.
Although she doesn’t mention the state authorities who tried to kill her a month ago by injecting 5g of pentobarbital into her arms, she makes a pointed criticism clearly aimed at them. “I am deeply hurt by the incompetence that has placed so many people in this terrible situation,” she said.
Pike was strapped to a gurney in the Tennessee execution chamber on September 30, facing death for the 1995 murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18. Members of the execution team spent nearly an hour trying to establish an intravenous line through which to pump the sedative, but the procedure was botched and the prisoner survived.
Medical experts told the Guardian they were shocked by the apparent level of incompetence displayed in the execution chamber, after a detailed account of events was released by Pike’s lawyer, who was present in the room.
Pike is being held in the infirmary at the Debra Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she was released after 10 days of intensive hospital treatment. She is kept largely in isolation, she said, “away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me.”
Such isolation is itself a form of pain, she said, given that she spent the first 28 years on death row, in solitary confinement.
The events of September 30 shook Tennessee and sent shock waves across the United States. The state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, ordered a pause in executions until an outside review is conducted.
It’s unclear exactly what Tennessee plans to do with Pike. Earlier this week, Lee said he expected his death sentence to remain the same unless the courts rule otherwise.
Pike, dictating her statement to her lawyers, said she was prepared to die that night. “I had made my peace.”
Since waking up, “alone in a hospital, confused and in pain,” she has been searching for meaning in what happened to her. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what’s next. Some days finding hope is harder than others. For now, I’m trying to heal, one day at a time.”
She said that in her slow road to recovery, she has drawn support from “the extraordinary love and support I have received from people all over the world. Knowing that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is humbling.”
She thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who treated her at the hospital, as well as her lawyers and those who “fought for me, stood by me and refused to give up on me.”
She added: “I cling to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone. »
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