Medical experts shocked by Tennessee team’s ‘malpractice’ in Christa Pike’s failed execution
New details of IV team’s attempts to find a vein shared by Pike’s lawyer ‘shocked and disturbed’ practitioners
Medical experts have expressed shock at the apparent incompetence shown by Tennessee’s execution team during the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike, the prisoner who survived a normally fatal dose of pentobarbital, which they say would be considered medical malpractice in any other setting.
New details emerged on Thursday of how Tennessee’s intravenous (IV) team struggled for almost an hour to set up a line into Pike’s arms through which she would be administered the fatal dose of sedative. A blow-by-blow account was released in legal proceedings from Pike’s lawyer, Randy Spivey, who was present inside the death chamber at her 30 September failed execution.
The technical procedures attempted by the four unidentified members of the IV team as they tried to find a vein, as described by Spivey, provoked alarm among medical experts. They said the standards applied appeared to fall glaringly short of anything that would be deemed acceptable in a medical environment.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/24/christa-pike-execution-medical-expertsOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
54 replies
Abolish the death penalty. The end. The US clings to practice leading to the largest prison population, the way it clings to its gun policy. Neither are working despite giving it decades to prove itself.
i expect nothing less from that "state you fly through to get to florida"
This woman committed a crime as a teenager then spent 20 years in prison waiting to be murdered by the state. How barbaric. Abolish prisons
Abolish the death penalty. Anyone who has been in county lock up knows we need prisons.
I am not for the death penalty in any capacity. However, this woman kept trying to murder people while in prison, although in far less horrific and dramatic ways than she murdered Colleen. I imagine the isolation she experienced on death row had an effect on the murder attempt? She needed to be in a psychiatric hospital
(I thought I had read elsewhere that she had two murder attempts on fellow inmates, one involving a romantic partner, but Wikipedia only has one attempt so I'll leave it at that)
Prisons need to be restructured for the purposes of rehabilitation
LOL sure let's just let a teen murderer wander around, Should have been zapped the moment guilt was proven.
Moron.
Hey dipshit no one said let murderers wander around. Should check out this thing called critical thinking and couple it with empathy so we can get out of biblical ages eye for an eye bullshit.
30 years, even. Most of her life.
30 years, even
Should have been put to death right after the sentence. Read up on what she did she’s a fucking monster and deserves to die.
Don't care, the government shouldn't be in the business of executions. You can always, to a lesser or greater extent, make things right with unlawful detention and charging an innocent person. You can't un-kill a person if you get things wrong.
maybe so. but a gov should not be the one to do it.
Are you suggesting it be a private company or what?
Or the church? 🤣
I'm guessing no licensed doctor or nurse or medicine practitioner of any sorts would have wanted to take place in that, so they took whatever muppets they could find?
they dont, they have some janky "medical staff' to do it. likely not even taken a phelbotomy course. nurses and doctors arnt going to risk thier LICENSE and reputation, they can make more money in private pratices without the potential to get blackballed.
No need to guess, that's exactly what happens. No ethical medical professional participates in executions.
Including the drugs that are used. Which reputable pharmaceutical company wants to be associated with producing the drugs for lethal injection?
The drugs stopped being produced in 2011. So what remains has expired at this point.
So even if we consider they have stocks, those meds will not work as intended.
Expired meds can have a lot of differences. Sometimes they are fine for years after expiration. Sometimes they become less effective. Sometimes they have wildly different effects and interactions and the medication breaks down.
Unless you actually no the shelf life of pentobarbital, that argument isn't even worth making.
All drugs are required to have an expiration date. Drug companies will only go so far out on that time period in order to cover their asses. Plus, it's bad for business if you're selling meds put people could still safely use them 20 years later and don't need to buy fresh stock. Pentobarbital could start losing potency in 5 years, or it could be shelf stable for 100.
Regardless, this wasn't the drugs fault. A flipping 24 gauge needle. Oof. I'm just an EMT and I know that's way too stupidly small. Not to mention all the other signs.
John Criscio, president of Absolute Standards, said the company ceased producing pentobarbital in December 2020.
Absolute Standards, says it needs to be refrigerated and has a shelf life of 2 1/2 years.
Ideally yes, but
I wouldn't put it past some of them to volunteer for a job like this because they get a chubby from causing suffering to patients.
Nurses i can see that, because places are so short for nurses, they sometime let certain types of nurses thoguh the cracks.
My sons gf is in nursing school right now and she and I were talking about the people in her cohort who are anti vax and the overlap with the overt religious right and virtue signaling and “care culture” there’s absolutely a whole group of people within medicine exactly as you described who have values completely at odds with the hippocratic oath
there is a strange relationship between nursing and right wing christians, something about thier only JOB for these people.
My wife’s residency director is anti vax. This is a person in charge of teaching new doctors. She’s also a super Christian originally from Idaho.
Absolutely disgusting.
There are doctors who take their Hypocritic Oath more seriously than their Hippocratic Oath
Your average phlebotomist will be far better than most doctors and nurses at putting in a line
They easily could have found a phlebotomist who needed the extra money. This is simply incompetence. Unbelievable levels of it
Is it actually all that easy to find medical professionals who don't have qualms about killing people as a side gig from their day job of healing people?
Can't even provide enough funding for legalized murder while we still have a barbaric death penalty.
And keep in mind, the team struggled so much because they have to find medical staff who are willing to murder someone, to cause harm, because that violates the Hippocratic oath they all take. So most of the time the medical staff aren't qualified individuals, it's whoever will accept the meager pay to murder someone for the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjawA93_jAs
Nurses and docs can make bank doing private practices, no need to risk thier careers and license.
Phlebotomists don't take oaths but they didn't even know to look for one willing to do it.
phlebs do require certifications/license, they dont want to get that revoked too.also phlebs are wanted in alot of medical professions, so they arnt exactly large number of them jobless.
I fear they're more likely to give it to the sick sycophants who salivate at the mouth at the thought of legal murder
I feel like we will find malice was the motivator.
What other motivator could there ever be in a death sentence?
In theory that should be carried out like euthanasia. Imagine someone putting down your dog and they cause all kinds of suffering because they like causing it and the animal is gonna be dead either way. It wouldn't be acceptable either.
How is that anything other than vengeance?
You can put a person in prison for life to stop them from ever killing again.
There aren’t prisons for dogs killing, but there could be.
I'm not arguing pro death penalty. I'm actually hardline against it. I agree with your statement absolutely. Just stating that the malice part comes from the unnecessary cruelty, intended or not. In theory the protocol was designed to be painless and clinical, but they keep botching it but also keep doing it, which is in fact malicious even when applying Hanlons razor.
Why the hell don't we just swap their air supply with nitrogen? No medical knowledge needed, no pharmacy needed. Considering the number of engineers in the defense industry they don't exactly have a Hippocratic oath. Most of air is nitrogen so your body doesn't fight it. You just feel stupid and loopy and high like losing cabin pressure in a airplane. CO2 or Helium would work as well.
Sometime, as a little treat for yourself, see if you can huff the whiff of nearly pure CO² gasthat forms in the neck of a coke bottle when it is first opened.
That little whisp of vapor.
It's neat to see how carbon dioxide feels to breathe.
Why dont you just stop behaving like barbarians and give an end to this practice?
They botch that too. The few times they've done it the prisoner ends up suffocating to death because they don't vacate the CO2
Abolish the death penalty
CO2 makes you panic, that would be horrific.
nitrogen would also be inhuman, because gas is associated with the gas chambers.
Exactly what I was thinking! Helium, yes. They actually use it for unlicensed euthanasia.
Nitrogen is preferred. Your body can detect elevated CO2 levels and make you start to gasp breath. Helium would make the person’s voice go squeaky. I don’t think anyone involved wants the condemned shouting in a Mickey Mouse voice before they die.
CO2, absolutely no! Elevated carbonic acid in your blood causes a very visceral reaction.
We think this would humane, but we dont actually know is my understanding.
Not that this was humane either.
Edit: i think you meant CO, not CO2.
That was blatantly obvious from the start. You need iv access, you find people with iv skills. This person did not have those skills and plowed ahead anyway like a sociopath.
I'm super against the death penalty for crimes cause the state has been proven to murder innocents. But I also gave plasma in college for weed money, and those phlebotomists are barely high school graduates. How could they have found someone so incredibly inept‽
I'm not the easiest stick, and there are many so-called phlebotomists that use me as a human pin cushion. Then there are others that can hit my vein on the first stick. It's about 50/50 what experience I will have.
Yeah, I've never had a problem so relying on my own experience probably isn't the best basis for statistical analysis.