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.
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.
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.
pent 20 years
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.
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
They easily could have found a phlebotomist who needed the extra money.
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.
Nurses and docs can make bank doing private practices, no need to risk thier careers and license.
I fear they’re more likely to give it to the sick sycophants who salivate at the mouth at the thought of legal murder
most of the people doing executions arent even trained medical professionals, probably just someone they can convince to do the “injections here or here”
I feel like we will find malice was the motivator.
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.
Orphan crushing machine moment.
Just abolish the death penalty.
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.









