US death row inmate Christa Pike says she continues to suffer severe physical and emotional pain weeks after surviving a botched lethal injection, raising fresh questions about the failed execution that left her critically ill.
In her first public statement since the September incident, Pike, 50, said she had not experienced a moment without pain since the attempted execution, describing injuries affecting her arms, hands and throat.
“My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” she said, adding that the experience had also caused deep psychological and emotional distress.
Pike survived two injections of pentobarbital during the execution attempt in Tennessee. She was discharged from hospital at the end of September and returned to the prison where she has been held for about 30 years.
Her lawyers had earlier disclosed that she developed pneumonia, suffered significant swelling in her arms and experienced difficulty swallowing after the procedure.
Although she said her condition was gradually improving, Pike stressed that physical recovery had not erased the trauma of the incident.
“I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger. But healing is not the same as being okay,” she said in the statement released on Friday.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and killed after meeting her at a job training camp for low-income young people.
Pike was 18 at the time of the crime. Shipp, who was not legally an adult, escaped the death penalty and remains in prison.
The failed execution has drawn international attention, with Pike reportedly believed to be the only person to have survived an execution attempt by lethal injection.
She said she had not prepared herself for the possibility of surviving the procedure and expressed anger over what she described as the incompetence that placed several people in a distressing situation.
The botched execution has also reopened painful questions for Slemmer’s family. Her mother, May Martinez, who attended the execution, had campaigned for Pike’s death sentence to be carried out and later described the incident as a “mess”.
Martinez told a local television station in Florida that the state owed her an apology, saying her only expectation had been to see justice served.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has not explained why the execution failed, although it has defended the lethal injection method used. The department declined to comment on Pike’s latest statement when contacted by the BBC.
Following the incident, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent review to establish what went wrong.
Asked about the possibility of another execution attempt, Lee said this week that he expected Pike’s sentence to remain unchanged unless the courts determined otherwise.
Pike was the first woman scheduled for execution in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her lawyers had pursued appeals for decades, but the US Supreme Court and Governor Lee declined to halt the execution in the days leading up to the September attempt.
The BBC reported that the state’s investigation into the failed procedure remains pending.
