WASHINGTON: A convicted US killer who survived a botched execution is shackled to her hospital bed, awake and able to speak a little, her lawyer said on Wednesday, as a court ordered prison authorities to preserve evidence in the case.

Christa Pike, 50, who was sentenced to death for a murder she committed when she was a teenager, received two supposedly lethal doses of the drug pentobarbital at a Tennessee prison on Wednesday.

She survived the injections, however, and was rushed to a hospital where she was initially in critical condition, unconscious and on a ventilator. Pike “regained consciousness yesterday and is speaking limitedly,” her lawyer Luke Ihnen said at a court hearing, adding that she was shackled to the bed.

“Medical staff have asked that the shackles be removed and have been denied that request,” Ihnen said.

An anaesthesiologist retained by Pike’s lawyers as an expert ahead of her execution told BBC that she was off the ventilator. She has “no memory, I believe, of the execution attempt,” Joel Zivot said, adding that Pike knows her name and thinks it is currently September.

“Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” her lawyers said on Tuesday, calling for Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison. The court ordered state correction officials to preserve all evidence related to the botched execution including medical supplies, waste, and audio and video recordings. Pike’s fate revived debate over capital punishment in the United States.

Lee suspended executions in Tennessee pending an independent investigation and the state’s prison chief resigned. Tennessee’s correction department has maintained that it followed established protocol.

The state of Texas was scheduled to carry out an execution later Wednesday, the first in the US since the attempt to put Pike to death. Jamaal Howard was set to die by lethal injection for killing a store clerk during a 2000 robbery.

Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2026