US execution survivor Christa Pike released from hospital, back in prison

Death row inmate Christa Pike was released from a US hospital on Saturday and sent back to prison where she will continue receiving medical care following her botched execution attempt in Tennessee, her attorneys said.

Pike was discharged from a local hospital and is now at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, where she has been housed for more than 30 years, said attorneys Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen from Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, and Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason from the Tennessee Office of the Post Conviction Defender in a joint release.

Pike, sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, awoke "angry and confused" in the hospital this week with a long recuperation ahead after surviving the attempted execution on September 30, her lawyers said on Wednesday. They previously believed she could be brain-dead.

Pike, 50, had been taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and ‌with severe arm injuries after two injections failed to kill her at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

A Tennessee judge this week ordered state officials to preserve all evidence related to their failed attempt to execute her, a development one of her lawyers called the "first of many steps to preserve and enforce her constitutional rights."

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions for the rest of the year while investigators look in to the botched execution of Pike and a similar failure involving Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to set up intravenous ​lines.

Reporting by Marianna Parraga in Houston; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Matthew Lewis/Reuters