Murderer Christa Pike’s hospital room is surrounded by guards while she is receiving treatment for a botched execution that she may never recover from, her lawyer said.

Pike was sentenced to death by Tennessee in 1996 at the age of 20 for the vicious torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer the previous year.

She had been on death row for 30 years until her execution, which had been delayed time and again, was scheduled to finally be carried out on September 30.

Pike, now 50, was injected by at least seven needles as medical staff attempted to give her two lethal doses of pentobarbital over the course of around two hours, according to witnesses and court filings.

But the murderer survived and could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the process, according to her lawyers.

By the time members of the media were ushered out of the viewing chamber at 8.53pm, a little more than two hours after they were brought in at 6.41pm, Pike could be heard snoring loudly from behind closed curtains.

Pike was taken to the hospital unconscious with her arms swollen and blistered from the drug. She was intubated and placed on a ventilator, and she remains alive but still unconscious as of Sunday, according to her lawyers.

One of her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that Pike’s room ‘is guarded’ and that she ‘may not fully recover.’

‘I think one of the main things that will leave this up in the air for a while is the fact that we don’t know what the prognosis is, as in the long-term prognosis. If she recovers, she may not fully recover,’ the lawyer said.

Ferrell added that Pike has not regained consciousness or been able to say anything since the failed execution, as far as he is aware.

The attorney also said that he has not been allowed inside the hospital room and that ‘we don’t really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several more days.’

The state of Tennessee has not yet announced whether it plans to attempt to execute Pike again, Ferrell added.

He said that he has asked the state’s governor to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison, given the mental and physical torture she suffered throughout the leadup to her execution and the botched process itself.

‘We don’t know right now, and we may never know, what sort of torture she endured during that process,’ Ferrell said.

During Pike’s attempted execution, she said: ‘My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,’ and at another point, asked: ‘Does this happen like that?’

The botched execution has become a scandal that even drew reaction from President Donald Trump, who the next day said: ‘How does that happen? Should be easy to do. It shouldn’t be very difficult.’

It also led Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada to announce he put in his resignation and will step down from the top role later this month.

Strada said it was a ‘great honor’ to serve in his position and that he still ‘believes the Department carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.’

‘Even so, stepping aside is in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward,’ he said.

Pike’s attorneys have argued that the Department of Correction failed their client.

The lawyers said they believe problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into Pike’s body instead of her bloodstream.

‘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 and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body,’ the lawyers wrote in a court filing.

They wrote that instead of ‘remedying this failure,’ the execution team prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes.

Pike’s lawyers are seeking to have all of the evidence from her botched execution preserved so they can ensure accountability and protect her legal rights. Christa Pike remains critically ill in hospital after surviving a botched lethal injection attempt in Tennessee, according to her lawyer. Pike, 50, is still on a ventilator, with her attorney Stephen Ferrell saying doctors do not yet know what her long-term prognosis will be. ‘She may not fully recover,’ Ferrell told CNN, adding that there could also be questions about Pike’s future competence depending on the extent of her recovery. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has since paused executions in the state for the rest of the year and ordered an independent investigation into what went wrong. #christapike #news #deathrow #tennessee #crime

The court filing emphasized that Pike previously filed an appeal claiming her execution would result in cruel and unusual punishment because of her individual physical characteristics, including thrombocytosis, post-traumatic stress disorder and small veins.

Tennessee’s execution protocol calls for a secondary set of drug syringes to be administered ‘if the inmate is not deceased’ after the first set. It does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Governor Bill Lee has halted any additional executions for the year and ordered ‘a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.’

At the age of 18, Pike lured Colleen Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s campus in January 1995 and, alongside her boyfriend and a friend, tortured Slemmer for up to an hour.

Slemmer was stabbed more than 100 times with a box cutter before Pike bludgeoned her to death with a piece of asphalt, carved a pentagram into her chest and took a piece of her caved-in skull as a sick souvenir.