Christa Pike's lawyers say she is walking and eating, nine days after two doses

Lawyers for Christa Pike said on Thursday that she has begun walking and eating again at a Nashville hospital, nine days after Tennessee gave her two doses of pentobarbital and she survived. The update sits next to a bleaker account her own attorneys gave a day earlier, and next to a court order that now freezes the physical record of the attempt.

On Wednesday, after a hearing in Nashville, attorney Randy Spivey said Pike had been thought brain-dead on Monday night, with life support due to be removed the next day. On Tuesday morning, he said, she woke and began talking, to the surprise of her lawyers and the medical team. He also said she had a blood clot in one arm, pneumonia, and could not swallow, and so had not eaten. Both arms and hands were badly swollen. Attorney Luke Ihnen called the hearing the first step in a long legal fight.

The Associated Press, quoting the lawyers on Thursday, reported that Pike, 50, was walking with help and eating. The two statements are a day apart. They describe a patient who on Wednesday could not swallow and on Thursday was taking food and walking with assistance. Neither statement is a hospital chart. Both come from the defence. Tennessee has not published its own medical account.

The judge on Wednesday ordered the state to preserve materials from the attempt, including communications, and to claw back items that might already have been deleted. Syringes, drug containers and labels were among the things the defence asked to be kept. The order also set a route for lawyers to see Pike in hospital on two hours' notice, with a prison warden granting access and the lawyers working around hospital visiting rules. Governor Bill Lee had already said, on Saturday, that Correction Commissioner Frank Strada would step down later this month. Lee paused the remaining executions scheduled this year, including the 3 December date for Gary Wayne Sutton.

Pike was convicted of the 1995 killing of classmate Colleen Slemmer. A previous execution date in May had already failed. The 30 September attempt went ahead after a federal appeals court issued a stay and the US Supreme Court lifted it the same day. By Thursday she was on a ventilator, with burns and blisters on both arms, in the account published that week. The Wednesday and Thursday lawyer statements are the first public signs of speech, then of walking and eating.

The evidence order is the part that will outlast the hospital updates. If the defence is going to argue that the procedure was carried out in a way the constitution forbids, the vials, labels and messages are the record. A destruction of that record would leave the case as competing recollections. The judge's instruction to recover deleted material shows the court treated loss of the file as a live risk, not a hypothetical.

What changed between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday is the defence description of her body: from unable to swallow, with a clot and pneumonia, to walking with help and eating. What did not change is her location, a Nashville hospital, and the legal position, an execution attempt that failed and a preservation order in force. The state still has to say what it intends to do about the sentence. Lee has already cancelled the next date on the calendar.