Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row inmate who survived a botched lethal injection, was discharged from the hospital Saturday. She is back at the women’s prison where she has been housed for 30 years.
“Please try up on my shoulder higher.”
That is what Pike told the execution team after the first dose left her arm burning, according to NPR’s witness reporting. Tennessee gave her two doses of pentobarbital on Sept. 30. The team could not place the IV correctly, so the drug pooled in the tissue of her arm instead of reaching her bloodstream. Her attorneys say the team never realized the lines were placed wrong.
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She spent days unconscious on a ventilator after the failed execution. Her lawyers were told at one point that she might be brain-dead. She woke up on Oct. 6, confused and angry, badly bruised, with pneumonia and a blood clot. By Oct. 8 she was walking with help.
The fallout keeps spreading. The state’s prison chief resigned. The Death Penalty Information Center says Pike is the first person on record to survive after execution drugs entered her body.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances.”
Pike’s attorneys, in a statement Saturday
Nobody knows what comes next. Tennessee has never had to decide what to do with a woman the state tried to kill and couldn’t.
See also: Vance Is Already Walking Back the Pentagon’s Plan to Livestream a Firing Squad Execution and Five People Found Shot Dead in a Georgia Home and Cops Say It Might Be Murder-Suicide