Last week, on 30 September, US death row inmate Christa Pike survived two lethal injections.

And her lawyers have now said she is ‘conscious and speaking’ as a doctor has revealed what she has said since awaking from the failed execution.

“She has some memories of being in the hospital but no memory, I believe, of the execution attempt,” Dr Joel Zivot, the anaesthesiologist advising her team, told the BBC.

He said that she can recall her name and can communicate in a ‘basic way’. Dr Zivot added that she had made an incorrect guess at the date, as she seemed to believe the month was still September.

It’s believed that Pike, who was sentenced to death after murdering Colleen Slemmer with her then-boyfriend in 1995, is the only person to survive a lethal injection.

Her legal team said in a statement: “Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care. Despite the severe damage she endured to her arms, she is still handcuffed and shackled to the bed.

“Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery.”

READ MORE: All of the failed lethal injection executions in the last decade

Dr Zivot said the development ‘bodes well for a good recovery’. But he said that it could be weeks or months before anyone knows exactly what Pike’s recovery might look like.

“She’s still in the ICU,” he said. “She has recovered to a certain degree that she’s able to be off a ventilator and able to speak, but in no way would I announce her free of further serious risk.

“There’s still a lot of bad things that can happen here, even when everyone is doing their job well.”

Pike was 18 when she and Tadaryl Shipp, 17, beat, tortured and killed Slemmer. Her then-boyfriend was spared the death penalty because he was not yet legally an adult and remains in prison.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has made it clear she was furious with the state’s governor, the director of the Department of Correction and the attorney general as she called the execution attempt a ‘mess’.

“They didn’t say anything, and then, all of a sudden, they asked all the victims to leave. And we left,” she told NBC News.

“We didn’t know anything until we got up to the office and saw the commissioner. And he said that it didn’t work, that it didn’t work, and she’s on her way to the hospital.”

What could happen to Christa Pike now?

It hasn’t yet been confirmed whether authorities will try again to execute Pike, and while the incident is investigated, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the remainder of the year.

Kenneth Smith and Alan Miller, who both survived botched lethal injections in Alabama in 2022, went on to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia two years later.

But Pike’s case could pose different questions, since she is unique in having been administered two full doses of pentobarbital and survived.

Fordham Law professor Deborah Denno told NBC that Pike’s legal team could argue that attempting to execute her again could qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. They could also argue that a second execution attempt would consтιтute double jeopardy, i.e. being punished for the same crime twice.

She said: “They carried out every aspect of the execution. She didn’t die, but every process they intended, they did it.”

Another expert, Seattle University Law Professor Michael Russo, disagreed, arguing that if Tennessee wanted to try and execute Pike again, the Supreme Court wouldn’t stop them.

He said: “I think what this Supreme Court would say is, her sentence was to die – to be executed – not to suffer an attempt at execution.”

And all of this is irrelevant if Pike has suffered serious brain damage and isn’t sufficiently competent to be executed.

Denno told CBS: “It depends on what kind of condition she’s in. An inmate has to be consciously aware that they’re receiving a punishment.

“If she has some sort of brain damage, she wouldn’t be eligible for the death penalty anyway.”