Death row inmate Christa Pike was discharged from hospital on Saturday and returned to prison, where she will continue to receive medical care following her botched execution in Tennessee, her lawyers said, Reuters reported. Pike is now back at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she has been held for more than 30 years, according to a joint statement from her attorneys Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen of Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in two centuries. She was taken from the execution chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to a Nashville hospital on 30 September, unconscious, critically ill and with severe arm injuries, after two injections failed to kill her.
A long recovery
Her lawyers said on Wednesday that Pike had woken up "angry and confused" in hospital and faced a long recovery, having previously feared she might be brain-dead. A Tennessee judge this week ordered state officials to preserve all evidence related to the failed execution, a decision one of her lawyers described as the "first of many steps to preserve and enforce her constitutional rights," Reuters reported. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigators examine Pike's case and a similar failure in May involving Tony Carruthers, when prison officials were unable to set up intravenous lines.
Source: Reuters
