Pike survived a lethal injection execution on Wednesday. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer.
Christa Pike, the woman who survived an execution attempt in Tennessee earlier this week, is on a ventilator as she receives care in the hospital, her lawyers said in a new statement Friday.
“Christa remains critically ill and is receiving medical care for the devastating effects of Wednesday night’s events,” the lawyers’ statement said. “She is critically ill, unconscious, intubated and receiving breathing assistance through a ventilator.”
The statement said she is being treated for “the serious effects of the pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms.”
Who is paying for all this care? The attempted execution seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. I’m not in favor of execution, but if you’re gonna do it, do it quickly and efficiently, as humanely as possible. We euthanize small animals all the time. Is this what they go through?
You assume that killing animals goes well all the time… its doesn’t and we mostly dont kill them before we butcher them.
Usually they are just stunned and the bled to death.
Which if course works but… not all the time.
Not nearly. I had to put down my dog recently, unfortunately and can share how it went.
I’ll start by saying it was time. She was over 15 years old, blind, and disabled. But rest assured that she had a very rich life full of friends and travel. We did everything we could to give her the best life we could afford.
The vet warned my partner and I about how quickly it takes effect. The first thing they did was put in an IV catheter, which was probably the most discomfort she faced. But she was getting spoiled during it. After that it was two shots. The first one made her let out a deep yawn and knocked her out asleep. The second one ensured she never woke up from it, effectively an overdose. She knew the vet well, so from her perspective it was some discomfort followed by a nap.
I miss her every day 💔
The state is.
Not in the slightest.
The protocols for euthanizing small animals are written by doctors and veterinarians and scientists. None of those people want anything to do with executions, so the protocols for executions are generally written by people with little medical training, and the people conducting the execution are in a similar boat.
The result is that execution protocols are far from optimal. Take for example the typical three drug cocktail- first drug knocks you out, second drug paralyzes you, third drug stops the heart. Only problem is the third drug is extremely painful so if the dosage of the first drug is too low you can be conscious for it but unable to move leading to one of the most torturous painful deaths you can imagine, which nobody on the outside has any idea is going on because you are unable to move.
A much better execution protocol would be something like fentanyl or a single massive overdose of barbiturates. Either one you would just pass out and die quickly. Another option is nitrogen, the air we breathe is 80% nitrogen so the body doesn’t react to it. Simply give somebody 100% nitrogen 0% oxygen, the brain is starved of oxygen, you get painless euphoric unconsciousness in under a minute and death in under 10 minutes. It’s also cheap as hell because it’s all around us.
Thing is- speaking for myself, as a pilot and scuba diver I understand exactly how nitrogen hypoxia works and I could write a 100% bulletproof execution protocol that could be administered by a trained monkey and would lead to a rapid painless death every time. I won’t do it. You could pay me a million dollars and I wouldn’t do it. I don’t have faith in our criminal justice system prudence to execute people. There are too many situations where innocent people have been convicted and executed and the system did not properly consider the evidence in their favor. As such I don’t think it’s ethical for me to help a system kill people when I don’t have faith that they are always going to kill the right people and not the wrong ones.
And the thing is, and not the only one. There’s an awful lot of doctors and medical technicians in this country, and prison systems still have trouble finding ones to deal with executions. There’s tons of pharmaceutical suppliers in the world and prison systems have trouble finding ones that will supply execution drugs at any price. The vast majority of people simply do not want to be part of capital punishment.
And as for who pays, it’s the taxpayer. Given the actual execution and all of the legal hurdles involved, it is a good bit cheaper to just incarcerate somebody for life. Which makes you wonder why some people are so dead set on having a death penalty when for less money we can just lock them up and throw away the key.
The issue with hypoxic mixis is that not all people react to it equally, it takes some time to actually do it thing in the range if minutes and you do remain conscious quite long.
So there is quite a big time frame were the prisoner knows whats happening and that time is pure panic.
Now if you simply would flood is cell with nitrogen im his sleep…thay would be stressless but anything else just leaves enough time for people to panic
They tried the nitrogen hypoxia
I saw that. Somebody seriously fucked something up there. My guess is whatever mask setup they use wasn’t giving him 100% nitrogen, or possibly he was holding his breath and fighting it.
I’ve also considered the possibility that he just didn’t want to validate nitrogen as a form of execution, so he made a conscious decision to make it look as painful as possible. If so I say fucking good for him. One of the reasons I would never help write night an execution protocol, even though I could do it, is I don’t want to further legitimize capital punishment in the US. And if there is an easy instant painless bloodless way to execute someone, that is one of the arguments against capital punishment that goes away.
If you ever think you are going to question the decision to not write those protocols, remember pro-execution people will probably send you death threats, over trying to be humane.
If they are going to argue that I or those like me should be compelled to participate in executions we have no interest in, then I would point out that all of their arguments for personal freedoms and liberties are not being upheld.
I think a great many of the people you describe are just overall hypocritical and don’t even realize it. IE, on one hand they demand the ten commandments be put up in schools, then on the other hand they push the death penalty which is very unlike the religion they claim to follow.
What?? No!
I’m saying that people that want the death penalty are the, “cruelty is the point” people and they would be mad if someone seriously made the process more compassionate
I gotcha.
The vast majority of those people seem to walk a tightrope between ‘bad people should suffer as an example’ and ‘if you killed someone you don’t deserve a painless death you deserve to suffer’ and ‘we support humane execution’. You can usually tell because they seem more interested in humane execution to shut down complaints than to be humane.
A much better protocol is single massive overdose of barbiturates??? Like 5grams of pentobarbital perhaps?
It’s great how you criticize a bunch of yahoos who wrote the protocol, then propose the same thing they did in this exact case.
Just ban the fucking death penalty.
Would you hypothetically share that bulletproof plan of yours to those seeking humane euthanasia?
Absolutely, although others already have.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59577162
You understand that they’ll take that too right?
also why wait 30 years? its not the same person anymore
Because of politics, legal arguments and a super-slow judicial system. Sometimes it can be accelerated. Timothy McVeigh was executed pretty quickly.
Most pharmaceutical companies won’t sell the state the drugs used to properly kill someone. Rather than stop executing people, the state tries to make do with whatever they can get their hands on.
Why not just buy fentanyl in bulk from China and give them a hot shot?
People keep suggesting that. I hear fentanyl overdoses are awful to experience.
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I believe there are all sorts of restrictions on what sources they are allowed to buy from. This is also supposed to be “punishment” so they don’t want the prisoner to feel good before they die.
I had fentanyl administered by a professional once and I didn’t feel good, I just lost consciousness within some three seconds. Probably the matter of right dose.
On the other hand, death penalty supporters probably wouldn’t want to take chances with the three seconds window.
The most humane way is probably the most gruesome way, which is beheading. Every other “humane” execution contains suffering for a bit, while beheading immediately overwhelm your brain with signals and you’re very unlikely to feel pain. The other way is by hanging, which will likely snap your neck once you drop down and overwhelm your brain with signals, but the risk is if the rope doesn’t adjusted to the right height you’re gonna hurt your neck while suffocating.
So get your guillotine now.
Yeah, a cruel (or just incompetent) hangman would shorten the drop so that you die from slow strangulation instead of a quick snap. And given the cruelty is the point, I wouldn’t trust Tennessee to do it properly.
Guillotines are effective, but if not kept properly maintained, they can fail to completely sever the head. And there is some evidence that death is not instant.
Personally, if I was to choose my manner of execution, it would be firing squad. But the most effective would be sedative overdose or nitrogen asphyxiation, again only if done properly.
Also the destruction of the brain like with what is used to kill livestock would also work. Brain can’t feel pain if it’s converted into a liquid.