Christa Pike makes first public comments since failed execution: ‘There is pain in my mind and in my soul’

Pike is facing death penalty for 1995 murder of classmate, despite surviving a botched execution last month

Christa Pike has marked a month since her failed execution by Tennessee and released a statement in which she laments the “incompetence” that has led to this moment, adding that despite ongoing healing she remains in constant physical pain and mental anguish.

In comments released by her legal team on Friday, the prisoner said that there had not been a moment since she was injected with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital that she had not been in pain. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said.

Though she does not mention the state authorities who tried to kill her a month ago by injecting a full 5g of pentobarbital into her arms, she does make a pointed criticism clearly targeted at them. “I’m deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position,” she said.

Pike was strapped to a gurney in the Tennessee execution chamber on 30 September, facing death for the 1995 murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was 18. Members of the execution team spent almost an hour trying to establish an intravenous line through which to pump the sedative, but the procedure was botched and the prisoner survived.

Medical experts told the Guardian they were shocked by the apparent level of incompetence displayed in the execution chamber, after a blow-by-blow account of events was released by Pike’s lawyer, who was present in the room.

Pike is being held in the infirmary at the Debra Johnson rehabilitation center in Nashville, where she was returned after 10 days of intensive hospital treatment. She is being kept largely in solitary confinement, she said, “away from other people and the human connections that mean so much to me”.

Such isolation was its own form of pain, she said, given that she spent the first 28 years on death row in solitary confinement.

The events of 30 September have roiled Tennessee and sent shock waves across the US. The Republican governor of the state, Bill Lee, has ordered a pause on further executions until an outside review is conducted.

It is not clear what Tennessee intends to do with Pike. Earlier this week, Lee said he expected her death sentence to remain the same unless the courts determine otherwise.

Pike, dictating her statement to her lawyers, said that she had been prepared to die that night. “I had made my peace.”

Since she awoke, “alone in a hospital confused and in pain”, she has been searching for meaning about what happened to her. “I don’t know why I survived that night. I don’t know what comes next. Some days, finding hope is harder than others. For now, I am trying to heal, one day at a time.”

She said in her slow road to recovery she drew sustenance from the “extraordinary love and support I have received from people around the world. To know that so many people care about me, that they see me as a human being whose life matters, is humbling.”

She thanked the first responders, doctors and nurses who cared for her in hospital, as well as her attorneys and those who “fought for me, stood beside me and refused to give up on me”.

She added: “I am holding on to the love and kindness of so many people who have reminded me that I am not alone.”