Lawyers for Christa Pike are asking a Tennessee judge to order prison officials to preserve and provide access to equipment and drug residue from last week's failed attempt to execute her for a 1995 murder.
Pike, 50, was taken unconscious and critically ill to a Nashville hospital with severe arm injuries after two injections of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.
Her lawyers said she had regained consciousness and was speaking as of Tuesday but remained shackled to her hospital bed.
Pike's attorneys are asking Chancellor I'Ashea Myles in Davidson County Chancery Court to require officials to preserve evidence from the execution attempt, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints.
They also want access to Pike to independently document her condition and permission to collect residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.
The Tennessee Department of Correction opposes the requested preservation order, describing it as "duplicative and unnecessary" because officials are already legally required to preserve the evidence.
Pike's lawyers argue that the failed execution, Tennessee's second botched execution this year, constituted torture in violation of the US Constitution's prohibition on cruel or unusual punishments.
They say Pike is the first person known to have survived a "completed execution attempt" in the United States.
Pike was sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture and murder of 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
Her attorneys had sought an alternative to lethal injection, arguing that her small veins and related medical conditions increased the risk of complications.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who denied Pike's clemency request to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, has called the failed execution a tragedy.
Lee has suspended executions for the remainder of the year and promised an investigation.
Tennessee and other states have struggled to obtain execution drugs from major pharmaceutical companies and have instead turned to small compounding pharmacies while promising to conceal their identities.