Lawyers seek preservation of evidence after prisoner received two doses of pentobarbital on 30 September

Christa Pike, a Tennessee prisoner who survived the state’s attempt to execute her, is awake and speaking as she receives treatment at a hospital, her attorneys said, as they head to court on Wednesday seeking a court order requiring preservation of all evidence relating to the botched exercise by the state.

Pike, 50, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedative, as Tennessee officials attempted to put her to death last Wednesday in a case that shocked many in America and created headlines around the world. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Ex-lawyer for woman Tennessee attempted to execute says defense filings said she was at risk for ‘exactly what happened’

A former lawyer for Christa Pike says he was not surprised that Tennessee botched its attempt to execute her because attorneys had warned that problems accessing her veins could make the procedure dangerous and potentially cruel.

James Crowson, who represented Pike during part of her post-conviction appeals, said he had followed the case from afar before the failed execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on 30 September.

What happened to Pike was gruesome. No one deserves what she went through, not even those who commit horrible crimes

Botched executions are nothing new in US history. In the era when hangings were common, some condemned people were decapitated. Later, when the electric chair was in vogue, every now and again, someone would catch fire during an electrocution. And nitrogen hypoxia, the US’s newest execution method, has already proven notoriously unreliable.

But, of all of the ways we have tried to execute people, lethal injection has the worst track record. More than 8% of all lethal injection executions have been botched. Most of them resulted when those charged with carrying them out could not find a usable vein.