Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death in Tennessee for her role in a brutal 1995 murder, remains in critical condition several days after she was hospitalized following a botched execution, her attorney said Sunday.
Stephen Ferrell told CNN that his client is still on a ventilator as doctors continue trying to clear two doses of pentobarbital, the lethal injections she survived, from her system.
Ferrell said that he has not seen Pike and that she has not spoken as far as he is aware.
Lawyers for Pike said Friday that she had been placed on a ventilator and was unconscious.
Pike was convicted for her role in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike and two other teens — her boyfriend and another girl — lured Slemmer into the woods in Knoxville, where they tortured and killed her.
Pike, who was 18 at the time of the murder, has been imprisoned for more than 30 years and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The two-dose injection administered to Pike on Wednesday was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year. Frank Strada, commissioner of the state’s Department of Correction, resigned last week and is expected to step down this month.
State officials have not said how they intend to proceed, though Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted executions for the remainder of the year. Ferrell told CNN on Sunday that the governor should commute Pike’s death sentence to a life sentence “at the very least.”
“I think one of the main things that will leave this up in the air for a while is the fact that we don’t know what the prognosis is, as in, the long-term prognosis,” he said. “If she recovers, she may not fully recover, and there may be issues about her competence. I mean, we just don’t know any of this.”
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