A new health update has emerged after a death row inmate survived two lethal injections. Convicted killer Christa Pike remains unresponsive but not in a coma following two attempted executions in which she was pierced with a needle seven times, her lawyer claims.

Pike, 50, is now receiving life-saving medical treatment and is in a critical condition after surviving two full doses of pentobarbital, a lethal drug, during the failed execution attempt on Wednesday evening.

Solicitor Randy Spivey said the execution was “inefficient, cruel, and torturous”. “Christa is alive. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health,” he said.

“I counted at least seven needles used in her left arm alone,” the defence solicitor said. One of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her left arm after an unsuccessful attempt,” he also added.

Spivey has urged Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s other solicitor, said she repeatedly assisted the execution team, directing them on where to locate IV lines.

He also said: “Ms Pike was not just cooperative, but was trying to help instruct the people placing the IV lines on where they could find them,” Mr Ferrell said. “She said over and over again, ‘Please, try up on my shoulder higher. Please, try here, please try here. I think it will be okay,’ and she thanked them, at least when they thought they had established a line.”

Pike was sentenced to death for a murder she committed at age 18 in 1995. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

She has been on death row for decades for the killing of Colleen Slemmer, with her legal team arguing she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Slemmer’s body was found with a pentagram carved onto her chest and with her head caved in by a piece of asphalt, with the pentagram attracting widespread attention due to fears of Satan worship during the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike would have been the 30th person executed in the U.S. this year.