Death row inmate Christa Pike has been released from a US hospital and sent back to prison, where she will keep receiving medical care after a botched execution attempt in Tennessee, her attorneys said on Saturday.
Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at the Debra K Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she has been held for more than 30 years, according to a joint statement from her lawyers from two legal offices.
Christa Pike’s condition after the failed execution
Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, woke up in hospital this week “angry and confused,” her lawyers said on Wednesday. She faces a long recovery after surviving the attempt on September 30.
Her lawyers had earlier believed she could be brain-dead. Pike, 50, was taken unconscious and critically ill from the execution chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to a Nashville hospital, with severe arm injuries after two injections failed to kill her.
Court order and Tennessee’s pause on executions
A Tennessee judge this week ordered state officials to preserve all evidence linked to the failed attempt. One of her lawyers described the order as the “first of many steps” to protect her constitutional rights.
Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year. The pause will last while investigators examine Pike’s case and a similar failure involving Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials could not set up intravenous lines.
