Pike says she remains in constant pain a month after injection
Christa Pike marked a month since Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her by releasing a statement Friday that blames “incompetence” for putting “so many people in this terrible position,” and that describes constant pain and isolation in a prison infirmary in Nashville.
The statement was dictated to her legal team and released by them. It is her first public comment since the 30 September attempt.
“I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” Pike said. The Guardian reported that the remark was a pointed criticism clearly targeted at the state authorities responsible for the attempt, who go unnamed in the statement.
The Guardian reported that the state authorities tried to kill Pike a month ago by injecting a full 5g of pentobarbital into her arms.
In the comments released by her legal team, Pike said there had not been a moment since she was injected with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital that she had not been in pain. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said.
Pike was strapped to a gurney in the Tennessee execution chamber on 30 September, facing death for the 1995 murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18. Members of the execution team spent almost an hour trying to establish an intravenous line through which to pump the sedative, but the procedure was botched and the prisoner survived.
Medical experts told the Guardian they were shocked by the apparent level of incompetence displayed in the execution chamber, after a blow-by-blow account of events was released by Pike’s lawyer, who was present in the room.
Pike is being held in the infirmary at the Debra Johnson rehabilitation center in Nashville, where she was returned after 10 days of intensive hospital treatment. She is being kept largely in solitary confinement, she said, “away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me.”
Such isolation was its own form of pain, she said, given that she spent the first 28 years on death row in solitary confinement.
The Republican governor of the state, Bill Lee, has ordered a pause on further executions until an outside review is conducted. It is not clear what Tennessee intends to do with Pike. Earlier this week, Lee said he expected her death sentence to remain the same unless the courts determine otherwise.
Pike, dictating her statement to her lawyers, said she had been prepared to die that night. “I had made my peace,” she said.
Since she awoke “alone in a hospital confused and in pain,” she said, she has been searching for meaning about what happened to her. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next. Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time.”
She said that in her slow road to recovery she drew sustenance from the “extraordinary love and support I have received from people around the world. To know that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is humbling.”
Pike thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who cared for her in hospital, as well as her attorneys and those who “fought for me, stood beside me and refused to give up on me.”
She added: “I am holding on to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone.”