Christa Pike may suffer life-changing side effects from botched lethal injection attempt, lawyer says

It’s believed that following Christa Pike’s botched execution, it’s ‘very possible’ she could have a life-changing brain injury.

The convicted murderer was due to be put to death via lethal injection on 30 September for the brutal 1995 killing of her JobsCorp classmate Colleen Slemmer. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.

However, as outlined by her lawyers, the execution failed, and although Pike had ‘lost consciousness,’ she still ‘has a heartbeat’ and was ‘audibly snoring’.

She also told the team that her ‘arm feels like it’s about to burst open’ and asked whether it was supposed to feel that way.

Dr Joel Zivot, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, told the BBC that he had been retained by Pike's legal team as a medical expert.

Speaking to the publication, he explained that Pike, 50, likely never achieved a sufficient blood level of pentobarbital, the lethal injection drug, to cause apnoea and cardiovascular failure.

It's been almost a week since Christa Pike's botched execution (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

He said: "It's very possible that, as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation, she will have a brain injury.”

It comes after Pike’s lawyers issued an update on her health on Sunday (4 October), confirming that she has been unconscious on a ventilator in hospital in the four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, and her prognosis might not be known for days.

Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell told CNN: “We don’t know right now, and we may never know what sort of torture she endured during that process, where her consciousness was, what physical pain there was, what mental torture she went through.”

He explained: “She's still in the hospital, on a ventilator, critically ill, we really don't know the prognosis yet, and may not know for several days.

"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.”

Following the botched execution, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to preserve ‘any and all evidence’ related to it.

She survived two rounds of lethal injection and is currently critically ill in hospital in Nashville (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

As reported by Sky News, in the filing, they claimed that it was problems with the IV lines that caused the drug to go into her body instead of her bloodstream.

They also claimed her arms were ‘swollen, burned, and blistered’ and ‘apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body’.

Pike’s lawyers wrote in the court filing that instead of ‘remedying this failure,’ they prepared and administered a second dose of pentobarbital.

Authorities are yet to confirm whether they will try again to execute Pike and are yet to offer an explanation for what went wrong.

However, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions for the rest of the year and ordered an independent investigation into the state’s capital punishment system, while the head of Tennessee’s prison system, Frank Strada, is resigning,