Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, is awake and speaking six days after surviving a failed lethal injection on 30 September, an event death-penalty experts say has no precedent in the US.
The survival is remarkable, but the sharper question now is whether the state can legally try again. Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, said Pike's lawyers have a strong argument that a second lethal injection would count as cruel and unusual punishment.
