Tennessee execution survivor Christa Pike is conscious and speaking, lawyers say

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 — Christa Pike, who survived a Tennessee attempt to ​execute her by lethal injection last week, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her ‌lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.

Despite severe injuries to her ⁠arms, Pike, 50, ​is "still handcuffed and shackled ⁠to the bed," where she "continues to receive critical ‌medical care," ‌her team of public defense attorneys wrote.

Pike, sentenced ⁠to death for her ⁠role in the torture-murder of a schoolmate three decades ago, survived a botched execution attempt on the night of September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state ‌capital, and has been hospitalized ​since then.

The episode capped a 30-year saga that began with the murder of a 19-year-old vocational student, Colleen Slemmer, by an emotionally troubled classmate whose punishment, her lawyers say, failed to account for her own childhood trauma as ​the victim of sexual abuse, neglect and untreated ‌mental illness.

Pike went ‌from ⁠being the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death in more than 200 years to becoming the first person in the United ‌States known to ​have survived after execution drugs ‌were administered.

(Reporting by ⁠Ismail ​Shakil and Daphne Psaledakis; editing by Michelle Nichols and ​Rosalba O'Brien)

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