Christine PikeLawyers said she suffered from pneumonia, a blood clot, couldn’t swallow and was unable to move her arms or hands once she regained consciousness at a Tennessee hospital, days after the death row inmate survived a botched state execution.
Pike was “taking limited action” with help on Thursday, according to his team. But they also said the deadly drugs she received could have lasting consequences on her mobility.
“His hands looked like they were wearing a surgical glove,” one of Pike’s attorneys, Randy Spivey, told reporters at a news conference Wednesday. “It was extraordinary.”
Spivey said he and Pike’s other attorneys learned she was brain dead Monday and expected her to be taken off life support. But the next day, she had woken up and started talking, he said.
The lawyer said it was his understanding that Pike’s first words were: “Where am I?” and “Who are you?”
“I don’t have an explanation for what happened,” Spivey told reporters after a hearing in Davidson County Chancery Court. He said Pike was confused and disoriented at first, but she began to remember details of Wednesday’s attempted execution.
In addition to the lung infection, a blood clot in her arm and a swallowing problem that prevented her from eating, Pike’s arms and hands are “extremely swollen,” Spivey said, adding that “we don’t know what function she will regain.”
Another lawyer for Pike, Steve Ferrell, described her cognition as “foggy” and told CBS News partner BBC News on Thursday that she could suffer “permanent damage,” although he said he had not seen her personally since she was hospitalized.
Pike is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The court grants the request for evidence
Before Pike’s attorneys shared updates on his condition outside Davidson County Court on Wednesday, they attended an emergency hearing in which they asked the Tennessee Department of Corrections to preserve records and other evidence of his failed lethal injection.
Chancellor I’Ashea Myles granted the order and said the state would be mandated to preserve “relevant evidence” from its failed attempt to put Pike to death on Sept. 30, including “medications, intravenous lines, needles, catheters, medical supplies, restraints, gurneys” and anything else that was in the execution chamber at the time of the procedure.
Myles said waste, such as packaging supplies and labels, as well as any written or digital records, including records of communication through encrypted platforms, testimony and correspondence regarding equipment or drug administration issues, must also be preserved.
She explicitly ordered the State “not to accidentally lose, misplace or delete any information that may be relevant to this litigation.”
“To the extent that information or evidence has already been discarded, deleted, destroyed or no longer exists, I would like (the Tennessee Department of Corrections) to take affirmative action to attempt to recover that information and put policies and procedures in place, while this litigation is pending, to ensure that no information is discarded or destroyed,” Myles said.
Continuation of execution
Staff had given Pike, 50, two doses of a lethal injection drug, but her legal team confirmed shortly after the failed procedure that, in an unprecedented turn of events, she was alive and had been hospitalized. Her legal team said Tuesday that she had regained consciousness and spoke from his hospital bed.
Pike’s lawyers also said Tuesday that she continued to “receive essential medical care” as hospital staff attempted to rid her system of the deadly drug pentobarbital. Her prognosis remains uncertain, they added, but she is expected to at least face “a long convalescence.”
Legal team renewed calls to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee commute Pike’s death sentencepushing him to change the sentence to life in prison without parole so that the state could not attempt to execute Pike a second time, which is the usual course of action after an inmate survives a botched execution proceeding. However, while others have survived botched procedures before, Pike is the only known inmate in the modern era of the death penalty in the United States to remain alive after actually being administered lethal chemicals.
“The state has not made any promise that Ms. Pike will not be subject to future execution,” Luke Ihnen, one of Pike’s attorneys, said in court Wednesday. The evidence the defense is seeking for the corrections department to keep could help them craft future arguments to prevent this from happening, Ihnen added.
Will Ayers, assistant attorney general for the state of Tennessee, told the court that there was no execution order pending for Pike, and “there is no allegation that an execution order is pending.”
Pike’s lawyers had filed an emergency motion Friday requesting that the Department of Corrections be required to “preserve all relevant physical, written and electronic evidence” of the failed execution, which they said amounted to “evidence of TDOC (Tennessee Department of Corrections) inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on Ms. Pike through its willful indifference to her basic medical needs and reckless disregard for basic medical practices and their own protocol lethal injection. »
They accused correctional staff managing Pike’s execution of failing to properly establish an intravenous line through which to administer lethal drugs, then failing to realize she had a “burst vein,” which would have allowed the pentobarbital to spread through her body and leading to a painful, botched procedure. In court, Ihnen also referred to the secrecy that surrounds execution protocols and procedures in Tennessee and elsewhere in the United States, which makes arguments over death penalty cases particularly difficult.
“We don’t know what they have, because they won’t tell us,” Ihnen told the court. “And so the preservation order seeks the broadest possible preservation of the evidence.”
Case history
Lee had rejected Pike’s request to commute his sentence before his execution date last week, rejecting his request for clemency in the days leading up to it. Subsequently, he canceled remaining execution is expected to take place in Tennessee by the end of the year and said an investigation would be conducted to determine what went wrong. Tennessee’s former corrections commissioner has resigned from his position, although an official statement from the agency claimed it followed protocols.
Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court records show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, cutting her with a meat cleaver and a box cutter for an hour in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, with the help of her boyfriend and a friend.
When Slemmer’s body was found, pentagrams were carved into his forehead and chest, and a piece of his skull was missing. Other students later told investigators that Pike bragged about removing the piece of skull and revealed to at least one person that she had kept it as a “souvenir.”
Pike spent more than three decades on Tennessee’s death row. As the only woman awaiting execution in the state for the vast majority of that time, she was alone for almost her entire incarceration. She was the first woman Tennessee attempted to execute in over 200 years and the first person the state attempted to execute in modern times for a crime committed when she was 18, 19, or 20 years old.
Before Pike’s botched injection, his case had attracted public interest as human rights leaders and advocacy groups rallied against his death sentence, raising issues related to his age at the time of his conviction and his long history of mental illness and childhood abuse. But those who strongly support his execution, including prosecutors and jurors in Pike’s original trial as well as the judges who presided over that case and many of his appeals, have countered that the death penalty was justified given the horrific nature of his crime. Among them is Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez.
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