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A Nashville judge said she would order Tennessee officials to preserve \u200call evidence from the state\u2019s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike last week for a 1995 murder, including the syringes and other tools used in two botched lethal injections.<\/strong><\/p>\n Pike, 50, was taken to a Nashville hospital, unconscious, critically ill and with severe arm injuries after two injections of the caustic \u200bbarbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution last Wednesday.<\/span><\/p>\n She had regained consciousness and was speaking \u200bas of Tuesday and remains shackled to her hospital bed, according to her lawyers, as they \u2060seek to pierce the secrecy that normally surrounds execution procedures in Tennessee and other states.<\/span><\/p>\n They have said the botched execution, the \u200bsecond this year in Tennessee, amounts to torture in violation of the US Constitution\u2019s prohibition on cruel or unusual punishments.<\/span><\/p>\n Pike, who was \u200bsentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, is the first person known to have survived a \u201ccompleted execution attempt\u201d in the US, her lawyers say.<\/span><\/p>\n They asked the judge in Davidson County Chancery Court, I\u2019Ashea Myles, to \u200border Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines \u200band gurney restraints.<\/span><\/p>\n Myles largely sided with Pike\u2019s lawyers at the end of Wednesday\u2019s hearing, describing the litigation, which began in January in an effort \u200cto \u2060prevent the scheduled execution, as unusual because no one had anticipated Pike surviving.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis case is unique, to say the least,\u201d Myles said.<\/span><\/p>\n She also ordered the state to preserve internal communications about the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.<\/span><\/p>\n She has yet to rule on a request by Pike\u2019s lawyers that the Tennessee Department of Correction let them take any residual traces of the \u200bexecution drugs for chemical analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n The \u200bTennessee Department of Correction has \u2060opposed what it says is a \u201cduplicative and unnecessary\u201d preservation order, arguing it is already legally required to preserve all evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n Tennessee and other US states have long struggled to acquire execution drugs. They \u200bcannot be obtained from major pharmaceutical companies because of a European trade ban on companies that \u200bsell products for \u2060use in torture or executions.<\/span><\/p>\n Tennessee, like other states, has turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to make small batches of the drugs, promising to hide their identity.<\/span><\/p>\n Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who denied Pike\u2019s clemency request to commute her sentence to life in \u2060prison, has \u200bcalled the botched execution a tragedy. He has suspended executions for the rest \u200bof the year and promised an investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n