Christa Pike's lawyers ask court to preserve evidence of failed Tennessee execution

Lawyers for Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee's attempt to execute her by lethal injection last week, will ask a Nashville court on Wednesday to preserve evidence from the failed procedure.

A hearing on their emergency motion was due at noon US Eastern time (6pm CAT on 7 October) in Davidson County Chancery Court, CNN reported.

Pike, 50, has been in hospital for nearly a week after being given two doses of pentobarbital on 30 September. Her lawyers and journalists who witnessed the attempt described about two and a half hours of disarray and prolonged distress as correction department staff struggled to administer the drug intravenously.

On Tuesday her lawyers said she was conscious and speaking but still receiving critical medical care, and had suffered severe damage to her arms. They said her recovery was medically unprecedented, her prognosis unclear and that they expected, at a minimum, a long recovery.

The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that she remained in hospital but said federal privacy laws prevented it from giving details of her condition.

The motion, filed on Friday, alleges that the department inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on Pike through deliberate indifference to her basic medical needs and reckless disregard of basic medical practice and its own lethal injection protocol.

It says the execution team used at least seven needles in trying to gain intravenous access, one of which was bent at a 90-degree angle when removed.

Her lawyers first told the state of its duty to preserve evidence at 1.09am Eastern time on Thursday, hours after the attempt, according to the motion.

They are asking the court to preserve physical, written and electronic evidence. They say that when Pike arrived at the hospital her arms were swollen, burned and blistered, and that pentobarbital burns skin, tissue and veins on contact.

Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a fellow student at a job training programme. It was the state's first attempt to execute a woman in two centuries.

Stephen Ferrell, one of Pike's lawyers, told CNN on Sunday that the state attorney general's office had not said whether it would try to execute her again. Her lawyers have asked Tennessee governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life in prison without parole.

Lee suspended executions for the rest of the year after the failed attempt and announced that a third party would carry out a thorough review of the case. Correction commissioner Frank Strada is to step down later this month. US senator Marsha Blackburn, who is running to succeed Lee as governor, called for the return of the electric chair.

Ferrell said Tennessee had to tell its people exactly what it was doing so that voters could decide whether they wanted it done in their name, and that the execution left many questions the state would refuse to answer.

Sources: CNN, principally; additionally, Reuters & ABC.