Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike’s defence team, said on Tuesday that the likelihood of recovering from lethal injection is low.
“Most people who get lethal injection die from it,” he told the BBC. “In fact, pretty well everyone, except Christa. So, the fact that she survived it … was unusual.”
But there remains a lot of uncertainty and many unknowns, he said, including how much of the pentobarbital got into her system, what her blood levels were after the injection and what her recovery will look like.
“I would not, in any way, say at this point that all the big risks are behind her,” he noted.
Zivot had previously said the two doses of pentobarbital she received last week would have been enough that, had it entered her bloodstream in normal circulation, “she would have surely died”.
Instead, Zivot said a possible explanation is that instead of entering Pike’s bloodstream, the pentobarbital was more likely to have spread across the tissue under her skin.
Zivot said last week he thought her ending up with a brain injury was “very possible”, due to the delays in resuscitating her. He also believed it would take about a week to truly understand her condition and do a neurological exam. It’s now been six days since the failed attempt to execute her.
Pike’s lawyers previously warned that her medical history and anatomy – including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins – meant there was a risk she would experience “unnecessary” pain and suffering during a lethal injection.
They said on Tuesday that she has endured “severe damage” to her arms.
In 2022, more than a third of executions across the US were botched or highly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks information about such cases.
For lethal injections, such incidents have typically occurred due to difficulty obtaining reliable IV access to the veins, though the underlying reason differs from person to person.
In cases the centre has documented, all failures happened before the lethal drugs could be administered. The last failed lethal injection that was tracked happened earlier this year – also in Tennessee.
The execution of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed in May after staff were unable to find a vein for a lethal injection. He was granted a year’s reprieve by the governor.