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.
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.