People are only just finding out Christa Pike was convicted of attempted murder while on death row

As Christa Pike recovers in hospital after surviving two attempts to execute her, many people are only now discovering that she was convicted of trying to murder a fellow inmate while she was already on death row.

The other conviction

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Five years later, on 24 August 2001, she attacked another inmate, Patricia Jones, strangling her with a shoestring. It happened during a fire-related evacuation. Jones was serving a life sentence for the 1994 murder of 84-year-old Alberta Coker. Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder in August 2004.

What Pike argued

Pike later argued that she had been trying to protect another inmate, Natasha Cornett. Jones testified that Pike intervened during a fight between Jones and another inmate. At Pike's appeal, Judge John Everett Williams acknowledged that "her stated intention was to protect" Cornett, but he said: "There was ample evidence by her actions and (Pike's) own words that contradicted this position."

Background on the original case

Slemmer was a fellow student on the Knoxville Job Corps programme. Prosecutors said Pike had become jealous because she believed Slemmer was interested in her then-boyfriend. She lured Slemmer into the woods, where she was beaten and stabbed with a cleaver, a box cutter and a piece of asphalt, and a pentagram was carved into her chest. Pike's legal team has argued her upbringing involved violence, sexual assault and substance abuse, and that it led to mental illness.

Where Pike is now

Pike was due to be executed on Wednesday 30 September, but the team struggled to establish an IV line for more than an hour and she survived two doses of pentobarbital. Her lawyers said in a court filing that problems with the IV lines meant the drug did not enter her bloodstream properly, and that her arms were swollen, burned and blistered when she arrived at hospital. Ferrell told CNN today, 4 October, that her condition "remains the same" and that she is "still in the hospital on a ventilator." He said "we may not know" a prognosis for "several days." Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent review and paused all remaining executions in the state this year.