SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Lawyers appeared in court in Tennessee today for the woman who survived a botched execution by two rounds of lethal injection last week. Her name is Christa Pike, and she regained consciousness yesterday. Pike is on death row for killing Colleen Slemmer in 1995, when both of them were teenagers. Catherine Sweeney with WPLN in Nashville witnessed that botched execution in person and has continued to follow the story. And she's with us on the line now. Hi again, Catherine.
CATHERINE SWEENEY, BYLINE: Hi, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: What is Christa Pike's current condition?
SWEENEY: Yeah. She woke up after being unconscious for five days and being on a ventilator. But I'd say there are two main takeaways after the court hearing and the press conference today - the damage to her limbs and the damage to her brain. So pentobarbital is alkaline. It's like a drain cleaner, and it causes burns and cellular damage. Her attorney said last week she had burns and blisters on her arms, and today, her arms and hands are severely swollen. One of her attorneys said her hands look like an inflated surgical glove. The scope of her brain damage is still being investigated, but here's her attorney, Randy Spivey.
RANDY SPIVEY: I was not in the room when she woke up, so I don't want to speculate too much. Our understanding was the first thing she said was, where am I, and who are you? There's still a lot of cognitive confusion.
SWEENEY: State officials aren't saying much. We don't know exactly why the two doses of pentobarbital didn't work, but we do know her attorneys and their medical experts predicted this outcome. They said she has a blood disorder and small veins, and Tennessee's prison system has a bad track record at placing IVs during executions. So they said that would all lead to this.
PFEIFFER: And what were her lawyers in court today for?
SWEENEY: Yeah. Big picture, they want to understand what happened that night on September 30. But smaller picture, today was about getting an order to preserve the evidence. To do that, they had to revive this old lawsuit that had stalled out in August. It was about the execution protocol. They had to do that because Pike, until yesterday, was unconscious. She couldn't consent to a new lawsuit being filed. Here's another of her attorneys, Luke Ihnen.
LUKE IHNEN: Until yesterday, Miss Pike was unable to speak. She was unconscious. She was not able to authorize us to file any sort of new lawsuits. And so the motion that we filed is just to preserve evidence. It's the very, very first step of what will be a long legal battle.
SWEENEY: And that was a win for them. The judge did order the state to preserve a long list of evidence, like the syringes and IV tubes and empty vials of medicine, as well as correspondence between the prison and the governor and the attorney general's office, also anything about concerns about a failed execution leading up to September 30.
PFEIFFER: Catherine, as you know, since this happened, there has been at least one resignation. There have been calls for investigations. Is Christa Pike currently still considered to be on death row, given what happened to her?
SWEENEY: That's a great question, Sacha. It kind of seems like nobody knows. It's a big question mark. Her lawyers don't know. They're asking for her sentence to be commuted. In court today, the state argued this whole lawsuit needs to be thrown out. It's irrelevant because she doesn't have an execution date ahead of her. The judge asked if that means that she's never going to have another execution date, and the state said, well, we can't say that. So they don't know.
We did have a big resignation. The corrections commissioner, Frank Strada, resigned over this botched execution. He was actually hired away from Arizona, where he oversaw three botched executions.
PFEIFFER: Yes. And our reporter, Chiara Eisner of NPR, has been reporting a lot about his history in Arizona, so a lot to report here. That is Catherine Sweeney with WPLN. Thank you, Catherine.
SWEENEY: Thanks, Sacha. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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