Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
Her survival has gripped the nation and become a flashpoint in the debate over the death penalty at a moment when support for the capital punishment is at its lowest in decades, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Conservative leaders, however, have continued to champion the practice, including in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike’s botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state’s prison system, said he would step down this month.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
May Martinez, the mother of her victim, had traveled from her Florida home to Nashville to witness the execution and has expressed frustration that the promised capital punishment was not carried out. Before the execution, Ms. Martinez told the Times she remained angry not only over the gruesome torture of her daughter — carried out by Ms. Pike and two others — but the toll of lengthy litigation over Ms. Pike’s execution.
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the front-runner to be elected governor in November, has said she believes Ms. Pike should face execution again. The office of the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, has not said whether lawyers will ask the Tennessee Supreme Court to set another date.
Ms. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
A teenager when she was sentenced to death, Ms. Pike had spent decades largely isolated in the Nashville prison as the only woman on death row. During those years, only one other woman, Gaile Owens, was ever held on death row at the same time and the two did not have physical contact.
At the prison, Ms. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers have since said contributed to the violence of her 1995 crime. In response to questions from The New York Times before her execution, Ms. Pike said “the biggest punishment was taking me away from people and human contact.”
A 2024 settlement allowed her to physically interact with other women in the prison. But in the days before her Sept. 30 execution, Ms. Pike was returned to isolation under Tennessee’s new execution protocol.
Her lawyers have fought to shield Ms. Pike’s privacy in the aftermath of the bungled execution. But one, Randy Spivey, has described her expressing an overwhelming confusion over what happened, as well as worry about her loved ones and Ms. Slemmer’s family.
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