Christa Pike, a 50-year-old woman on death row in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking more than a week after officials attempted to carry out her execution by lethal injection, her legal team said on Tuesday.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp tortured and killed at a teen job-training camp. The execution attempt last Wednesday involved two doses of pentobarbital administered intravenously, but the drugs failed to stop her heart, leaving her alive.

After the failed attempt, prison staff transferred Pike to a hospital in Nashville, where she remained under medical care while handcuffed to a hospital bed. Her attorneys said she suffered severe damage to her arms and that her recovery will likely be long and medically complex. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist consulted by Pike’s defence, told the BBC that the amount of pentobarbital that entered her bloodstream was far less than what would normally cause death, and that the drug may have spread through tissue under her skin instead of reaching her circulation.

Criminologist Deborah Denno of Fordham Law School described Pike’s survival as “medically unprecedented,” noting that while other inmates have briefly survived execution attempts, none had received a full dose of lethal chemicals. “They did everything they were supposed to do as part of the execution process, and it simply didn’t work,” Denno said. “This has never happened before.”

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the remainder of the year, and the head of the state prison system announced his resignation amid the fallout. The state has not yet indicated whether it will schedule a new execution date or provide an explanation for the injection failure.

Pike’s medical history, including a blood-clotting disorder and small veins, had previously raised concerns among her lawyers about the potential for unnecessary pain during an execution. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that more than a third of U.S. executions in 2022 were botched or highly problematic, often due to difficulties establishing reliable IV access.

Pike’s legal team is scheduled to appear in court in Nashville on Wednesday and plans to hold a news conference outside the courthouse. They have not yet indicated whether they will seek to block any future execution attempts or pursue other legal remedies.

The case has drawn attention to the broader challenges of carrying out lethal injections, a method that has become increasingly fraught with technical and ethical complications across the United States.