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Lawyers for Crista Pike, who survived two lethal injection attempts in a Tennessee prison, said on Tuesday that she has "regained consciousness and can speak", six days after her execution process failed in an unprecedented incident.
Her lawyers said in a statement, "Contrary to all expectations, Crista Pike is conscious and can speak and continues to receive vital medical care"
Crista Pike, 50, who was supposed to be the first woman to be executed in more than two hundred years in the southern state of Tennessee, survived an injection with two lethal doses of pentobarbital, a strong barbiturate, on Wednesday evening.
Since then, she has been in critical condition and connected to an artificial respirator, according to the brief information provided by her lawyers, who were not allowed to visit her in the hospital.
Her lawyers added in the statement, "We continue to call on the Governor of Tennessee to commute her sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of release", recalling the horrific forms of violence, especially sexual violence, that Crista Pike has been subjected to since she was a child, and her spending "about 30 years in solitary confinement" in the "death row cell"
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colin Slumm when she was 18 years old.
Crista Pike's failed execution attempt on Wednesday evening has once again sparked controversy over the death penalty in the United States.
Governor Bill Lee, who ordered a suspension of executions in the state and an independent investigation into Pike's failed execution on Thursday, accepted the resignation of the Tennessee Department of Corrections Commissioner on Saturday.
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