Christa Pike released from hospital following botched execution, lawyers say

Christa Pike, the woman whose execution by lethal injection was botched last month in Tennessee, has been released from the hospital and is now back in prison, according to her lawyers.

She has been transferred back to Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she had been held before her planned execution on Sept. 30.

“Christa Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center where she has been housed for more than 30 years,” her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement Saturday. “She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances. She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”

Pike, 50, was given two doses of a lethal injection drug, but her legal team confirmed shortly after the failed procedure that, in an unprecedented turn, she was alive and had been hospitalized. Her legal team said on Tuesday that she had regained consciousness and was speaking from her hospital bed.

On Wednesday, Pike began “taking limited steps” with help, according to her team. And on Thursday, her attorneys detailed more progress, saying in a statement that she was walking “with some assistance” and her arms were “healing and regaining movement and strength.” They also said that her “lungs are clear, and she has started to eat a regular diet.”

Pike is the only person known to have survived an execution attempt in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Pike was convicted in 1995 of the brutal murder of her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Court filings show that Pike, then 18, tortured and killed Slemmer, slashing her with a meat cleaver and box cutter for up to an hour in a wooded part of the University of Tennessee campus, with help from her boyfriend and a friend.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.