Christa Pike "Alert!"

Street cred. Woman allegedly alert after state sanctioned offing.

The Tennessee woman who was supposed to be put down in a state offing is still in a Nashville hospital in critical condition. No telling how much damage has been inflicted since the state botched her offing.

The lawyers says that 50 year old Christa Pike is handcuffed to a gurney but is alert and allegedly speaking. That means either two things:

Comatose.

Delirious.

Nevertheless, Republican Gov. Bill Lee is stuck with a decision. Either he returns her to the DEATH card or place her in confinement social services. Because clearly, she is not likely to survive this botched up offing. She will need lifetime care from this ordeal.

Pike was alive and loudly snoring after the attempted lethal injection and taken by ambulance from the prison, her attorneys said. She was being treated at a hospital, but they said they hadn’t been told about her condition.

She had been scheduled for execution at 10 a.m. Wednesday for the killing she committed at age 18 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. An appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start and hours later the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Officials gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, her attorneys said in court filings late Wednesday.

Pike’s attorneys are set to appear in court Wednesday as they are seeking more information from the Tennessee Department of Correction. Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles has scheduled a Wednesday morning status conference in Nashville in the case.

“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking, and continues to receive critical medical care,” attorneys for Pike said in a statement. Pike’s prognosis remains unclear and, at a minimum, she faces a lengthy recovery, the attorneys said. They said Pike’s arms were burned and blistered after the attempted lethal injection and that she is handcuffed to the hospital bed.

Pike’s attorneys are seeking a court order to require the prison system to preserve information from the attempted execution including drug lot numbers, needles, execution logs and other information.

Attorneys with the Tennessee attorney general’s office wrote in a Tuesday court filing that the court order is unnecessary because the prison system is “obliged to maintain this evidence in other cases and must assure it is preserved.” They said state officials have taken “the necessary steps to obtain medical care for Pike and ascertain what occurred.”

Lee called what happened “deeply disturbing” and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” The governor postponed the state’s only other execution scheduled for this year.

Medical and lethal injection experts have focused on the possibility that a problem with the IV line caused the drug to pool in her tissue rather than entering her bloodstream. Pike’s attorneys wrote in their court filing that “apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown.”

The attempted execution got underway around 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 30 when Pike was given a chance to make a final statement. About five minutes later, Pike raised her head and said her arm was hurting. At some point she appeared to lose consciousness, but she could be heard audibly breathing until media were escorted from the witness room at 8:53 p.m. An ambulance arrived at the prison at 9:14 p.m. to take Pike to a hospital.