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The inmate who survived a botched execution in the United States last week is conscious and speaking, although her prognosis remains uncertain, her lawyers said on Tuesday.
Christa Pike, 50, received two doses of pentobarbital at a Tennessee prison a week ago, and had since been in critical condition, unconscious and on life support.
The woman had been sentenced to death for a murder she committed when she was a teenager.
Pike's lawyers said that "against all odds" she is "conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care."
"Despite the severe harm she suffered to her arms, she remains handcuffed and shackled to the bed," they noted in a statement.
"Her recovery is medically unprecedented. Her prognosis remains uncertain but, at a minimum, we anticipate a long recovery," they added.
Her lawyers reiterated the call for Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike's sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The director of the southern state's prisons resigned and Lee suspended the application of the death penalty following the botched execution, pending an independent investigation.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of her classmates at a vocational training center. Pike was 18 at the time. Her two accomplices, also teenagers, were spared the death penalty.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center in the United States, Pike is the first female inmate to survive "after receiving injections with lethal doses of drugs used in executions."
[Publicidad]