According to a Guardian opinion column by Moira Donegan published Thursday, Christa Pike, now 50, was scheduled to be executed by the state of Tennessee on September 30. The execution was halted after two injections of pentobarbital, the barbiturate at the center of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol, failed to kill her.

In the execution chamber, witnesses reported hearing Pike complain of a burning pain in her arm, which she said felt like it was about to burst, per the column. Pike was transferred to a Nashville hospital, where she was intubated and kept unconscious for nearly a week before waking.

Pike is now awake and talking but her arms are severely injured and not fully usable, according to the column. She remains shackled to her hospital bed. Pike is “foggy” from the state-administered overdose, and doctors are assessing possible brain damage; it is unclear whether she will recover full cognitive function. Pike remembers the moments when Tennessee tried and failed to kill her and is “reportedly very angry.”

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer. Pike, then 18, and her 17-year-old boyfriend lured Slemmer into a wooded area, tortured her for about half an hour, and killed her by smashing her skull with a piece of concrete, per the column. Slemmer’s mother has been a vocal advocate for Pike’s execution and was reportedly furious that her daughter’s killer survived the September 30 attempt.

Before the scheduled execution, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol, arguing that the lethal injection regimen was likely to fail again. The challenge came after a documented failure in May, when prisoner Tony Carruthers was sent to Tennessee’s death chamber but left alive after officials struggled to find a vein, puncturing their prone prisoner more than a dozen times over the course of an hour.

Pike’s lawyers said she had vein issues similar to Carruthers’ and that an ordeal like that would be unconstitutionally torturous given her history of trauma, which the column described as “lengthy and acute.” In a taped interview quoted by the column, Pike said the lethal drug posed a particular risk. “The drug supposedly burns very bad,” Pike said. “And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Draino in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me.”

Pike asked to be hanged by the neck until dead instead. Tennessee denied the request.

Donegan, writing in an opinion column, characterized the execution attempt as “torture” and argued that lethal injection was designed to “medicalize the death penalty’s brutality” while obscuring its violent reality. She noted that the protocol was developed in the United States and first adopted for executions in the late 1970s, meant to replace gas chambers, electric chairs and firing squads with a more dignified and civilized method.

She wrote that the death penalty “does not mete out justice so much as lower the collective community to the level of its worst perpetrators.” Donegan also argued that Pike’s criminal trial had not considered “factors in her life that might have explanatory, if not mitigating, power — such as the reality that she committed murder at the end of a childhood that had been marked by horrific, repeated, and severe sexual and physical violence.”

Tennessee has issued a temporary moratorium on executions, and the governor has called for a review of what went wrong in Pike’s execution.

It remains possible that Pike could be sent back to the execution chamber. Donegan argued that Tennessee “should not get a second chance to try to kill her” and that the repetitiveness of the death penalty’s injustice was itself one of the system’s harms.