Critical Condition

Christa Pike remains in critical condition on a ventilator, her attorney said Sunday. The prognosis may not be known for several days, the attorney said. Days after a failed lethal injection in Tennessee.

Attorneys Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen said in a statement reported by ABC News that Pike is unconscious and suffered significant injuries to both arms from the sedative pentobarbital. Randall Spivey, another lawyer on her team, counted at least seven needles used in her left arm during the execution attempt, NBC News reported. One came out bent. Her right arm turned purple after a second dose of the drug.

Pike is 50. Court records cited by CBS News show she was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a former classmate at a Knoxville Job Corps center. She was 18 at the time. Months before the execution, Pike's lawyers told the state that a blood condition and documented trouble finding her veins made a single dose of pentobarbital likely to cause a painful death, CBS News reported.

Media witnesses told NBC News that Pike complained her arm felt like it was about to burst. She moaned, kicked and snored for roughly an hour before an ambulance was called to the prison. Democracy Now! reported that she smiled and laughed before the drugs took effect, then gasped repeatedly and kept breathing for more than two hours, making her the first person known to survive a lethal injection in the United States. Steven Hale, a reporter who witnessed the execution, told Democracy Now! he had seen five executions in Tennessee. "Never seen anything like what we saw," he said.

Gov. Bill Lee ordered a third party review. He said Tennessee will not carry out any more scheduled executions this year, ABC News reported. The Department of Correction followed its protocol, Lee told reporters, though he called the outcome "a tragedy." "It shouldn't have happened," he said. Pike's lawyers, including Spivey, want him to commute her sentence. They call the attempt "cruel" and "torturous."

May Martinez, Colleen Slemmer's mother, told ABC Jacksonville affiliate WJXX that she wants an apology from the state. No one had apologized as of Thursday, she said. The execution stays on hold while the review continues. "I think that the state owes me a big apology," Martinez said, according to ABC News.