US execution survivor Christa Pike says she is now in ‘constant pain’

An American woman who survived an execution in a Tennessee prison has spoken out for the first time.

In a statement released via her legal team on Friday, Christa Pike, 50, said she is now in constant pain and struggling to speak.

“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain,” Pike said, adding that the pain is both “physical and emotional”.

“I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” Pike said.

Pike and her boyfriend tortured, stabbed and beat a 19-year-old classmate to death in 1995. As Pike was 18 at the time, she was handed the death sentence.

The victim’s mother travelled from Florida to witness Pike’s execution.

Pike said she “continues to think” about the victim’s family and the “terrible pain and loss they have endured”.

Pike’s lawyers say the two separate doses of the lethal drug phenobarbital administered to her on September 30 may have failed to kill her because the drug did not enter her bloodstream. Instead, it pooled in her arms, leaving them burned and blistered.

Pike was hospitalised and unconscious for days following the botched execution.

Despite her ordeal, Pike remains scheduled to die, and is being held in solitary confinement in the interim.

Her legal team has asked a federal judge to allow her to interact with other prisoners, saying her isolation in the wake of the failed execution has caused “significant psychological harm and trauma”.

Her legal team has also asked Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee to change her sentence to life in prison.

Last week, however, Lee told reporters that he “suspects” her sentence will be the same as before, “unless otherwise determined by the courts”.

The failed execution has brought renewed scrutiny to how Tennessee carries out death sentences.

The Tennessee governor has organised an independent review of the failed execution and postponed the state’s other lethal injection scheduled for this year.

Frank Strada, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, announced his resignation in the wake of Pike’s failed execution.