Christa Pike has been discharged from hospital and returned to a Tennessee women’s prison after surviving an attempt to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyers said.
The 50-year-old was taken to hospital on 30 September after officials administered two doses of pentobarbital at the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center. She has now returned to the facility, where she has been imprisoned for 30 years.
Pike’s lawyers said she would continue to receive medical care in prison while they monitored her recovery. They also thanked the first responders and medical team who treated her.
She was sentenced to death for the 1995 beating and stabbing of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer.
The failed execution has renewed scrutiny of capital punishment in the United States. In Tennessee, Republican legislators have discussed alternative execution methods, including the electric chair and firing squads, rather than reconsidering the death penalty.
Support for capital punishment has declined from its peak in the 1990s, and 10 states have abolished it since Pike was sentenced in 1996. Executions nevertheless continue across the country.
Thirty people have been executed in the US this year, with a further eight scheduled, mostly in Texas and Florida.
A Pew Research Centre poll in July found that about two-thirds of US adults considered the death penalty morally justified for people convicted of murder. However, roughly six in 10 said it did not deter crime, while about seven in 10 believed there was some risk of an innocent person being executed.
