Poll finds around one-third of Americans support second execution attempts following the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike

Weeks after the botched execution of death row inmate Christa Pike, a new poll has found that around one in three Americans are in favour of second execution attempts.

The poll, published on Tuesday by Reuters/Ipsos, found that 39% of those who took part agreed that prisoners who survive a first execution attempt who should be allowed to live out the rest of their life in prison, and 26% did not know, reports People.

The results have been published three weeks since Pike, 50, survived two doses of a lethal poison during her execution attempt on September 30.

Pike was transported to hospital after the initial attempt was halted by officials. She was unconscious in a critical condition while under guard for five days, before she spoke to medics.

What could happen next for Christa Pike as lawyers confirm she has been released from hospital

Her lawyers said at the time, she was just hours from having her life support withdrawn, so her improvement was a ‘surprise’.

The following day, she was reported to have been walking.

In addition to finding around one third of Americans support a second execution attempt, it also found that support for the death penalty had decreased since 2017.

That year, 63% of respondents said they supported the death penalty for ‘the most serious crimes’, but the recent survey put this support at 55%. This represents a decline of 8 percentage points in the past 9 years.

At the age of 18, prosecutors allege Pike tortured and killed her classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike confessed to the crime and was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder and sentenced to death.

She became the youngest woman to receive a death sentence in the modern US and if she had been executed, she would have become the first woman to have been executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.

Pike has spent over three decades on death row (WTVF)

Since her botched execution, Pike has become the first person in America to survive being administered with a lethal injection during execution.

Others have survived only by a failure to find a line, which resulted in the execution being called off before the poison was administered.

If Pike does end up facing the death penalty for the second time, she would not be the first to do so.

In 2022, prisoner Kenneth Eugene Smith survived an attempted lethal injection in Alabama when officials could not establish a line in his veins.

Lawyer reveals the only other person in history to survive an execution attempt before Christa Pike (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

By 2024, after judges ruled that a second execution attempt was lawful, Smith was executed by nitrogen gas, becoming the first person in the US to be executed through this procedure.

Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee ordered a review of Pike’s execution attempt and suspended the state’s remaining executions for the rest of the year.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll included 1,679 American adults over a period of four days with a margin of error of around 2%.