Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death Wednesday for a 1995 murder after administering two doses of a lethal drug. A death penalty expert said it was an unprecedented failure, and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee halted the remaining execution for the rest of the year.
Golly, Tennessee. That’s really fucked up to torture her mind like that (not that it was on purpose). Talk about Cruel and Unusual punishment!
ETA: I don’t even know anymore what forum this should be in. Is this where we put breaking news?
During the execution attempt Ms. Pike reportedly said she felt a burning pain in her arm. She also asked if this was normal. I’ve seen speculation online that the IV starter person missed the vein and inserted the needle into surrounding muscle instead. But they did this deliberately.
Which resulted in:
The burning pain
Pike not dying
I don’t normally go for speculation with this kind of thing but I include this because it’s such an elegant (if potentially painful and risky) sabotage. But again—that is total speculation.
Eh, I don’t know if I’d read any nefarious intent (other than the whole killing somebody thing).
Corrections officers screw up injections all the time because reputable medical professionals won’t train them to do it, nor participate in it themselves. What the TN BoC wants to do is kill death row inmates, but the governor halted them from doing any of that for the rest of the year, thanks to this fuckup.
So this outcome isn’t what anybody wanted, and it’s an obstacle to TN killing as many people as they can by the end of the year. I rule it to be accidental due to incompetence.
I always thought that if they tried to kill you and it didn’t work, they had to stop trying. Not set your free necessarily, like in the movies, but didn’t get another chance to execute. Basically, commuted to a life sentence due to an Act of God or Force Majeure or something.
Anybody know whether that’s ever really been a thing outside of Hollywood?
After reading more, I see that it wasn’t two separate execution attempts. They have a back-up set of syringes and pentobarbital in case the first set don’t work. So they injected her twice int he same attempt. She STILL lived.
There was no emergency medical personnel on site, so they finally gave up and sent her to the hospital in an ambulance. Doctors said its likely she will have a brain injury due to the slow medical response.
The whole thing is so utterly barbaric. I mean, her crime was too, don’t get me wrong. But is this what we want to be? Should we be getting down on her level like this? The populace obviously needs to be kept safe from this person, and she has forfeited her right to freedom for sure, but isn’t incarceration enough?
The speculation I mentioned was about someone doing a very good thing–that is, the IV starter deliberately missing the inmate’s vein so as to sabotage the execution, thus saving her life. Not nefarious at all.
But either way, it’s still just someone’s wacky imaginings.
Yeah, if it’s true that she got brain damage from it, I’m not sure anyone really did her any favors, well-intentioned or otherwise.
My only issue with the death penalty is that we can never be sure enough that the person was guilty, and some states seemingly can’t be bothered to put in the effort. If we could magically read someone’s mind and know they were guilty and understand their state of mind, I’d be all for executing the worst murderers and rapists, not being especially concerned about their level of suffering, but that’s just not something we can know with any degree of certainty.
some people just need killing, but it’s impossible to be sure enough that we’re doing it right.
It’s all about retribution, not justice and keeping dangerous offenders off the street. From CNN:
Martinez said a group helped raise money so she [the victim’s mother] and her husband could travel from Florida to witness the execution.
I sympathize with the victim’s parents and cannot even imagine the pain the loss of their daughter must have caused them, but even so, the idea of traveling halfway across the country to watch somebody being killed is bizarre.
The idea is based on a misunderstanding of double jeopardy. The belief is they can’t punish you twice for the same crime. If the first hanging doesn’t kill you, then they can’t hang you again.
It doesn’t work. The sentence is to “be hanged by the neck until ye be dead”. If they don’t die the first time, then the punishment didn’t happen, and can be tried again, the same day, or at a later date.
It has happened on a few occasions, but it’s never been a rule.
Are there any types of executions which can’t fail? We’ve heard of botched hangings and electrocutions, and now injections? Perhaps we should be considering the guillotine which has/had virtually zero percent chance of failure (maybe the odd time the blade might get stuck in its tracks, but a little grease, and try again)?
I read about it in the Spanish on-line press, so I thought I would search for a US source to get the details. The search engine led me to this:
Witnesses to the execution of Pike – the first woman the state planned to execute in 200 years – said late Wednesday that authorities appeared to administer two rounds of lethal pentobarbitol but that the convicted murderer appeared to still be alive an hour later when witnesses were escorted out of the chamber.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections has not yet confirmed Pike’s condition.
Multiple witnesses said they could hear Pike breathing and snoring very loudly after the drugs were administered, even after the curtains were closed on the execution chamber.
The execution was stayed “until further order of this court,” the order stated.
In his dissenting opinion, Judge Richard Allen Griffin called the matter “another last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution.”
Tennessee Department of Correction Warden Kenneth Nelsen argued that Pike is not likely to succeed because her claim was “already unsuccessfully presented.” The state’s “strong interest in finality and the surviving victims’ right to closure” also require the high court to vacate the stay, he argued.
In a June court filing challenging her execution, Pike argued that due to her history of rape and sexual abuse, being “the lone female in a vulnerable position surrounded by male corrections officers during the last days of her life will trigger her PTSD and result in a torturous execution or mental decompensation to the point she will be incompetent to be executed.”
It seems the incompetence was on the other side. The whole affair is sick. No legal system is really satisfactory, most are not even acceptable. It seems the US legal system is beyond repair or redemption.
I am firmly against the death penalty, so I don’t blame medical professionals for not getting involved (aside from the ethics, the social attention would be enough).
I am a little confused about the Corrections officers screwing up.
Hitting a vein is really not that hard. Sure, most of my needles have been administered by either nurses in a hospital or trained personnel in a blood donation center, but as mid-adolescents, my friends and I on occasion drew blood from each other (used, amongst other things, for painting handprints on a wall. Adolescents will adolesce…) using syringes & needles that were intended for use in dogs… I’ve administered medication in cattle and dogs via intravenous, subcutaneous and intramuscular routes. I guess cattle veins are pretty big, though.
I’ve done this with the barest minimum of instruction, basically copying my own experience having my own blood drawn or my own body receiving injections. It really is quite trivial, even without training. And yes, there are people whose body weight, depth of vein etc make them harder to inject… practice makes perfect.
So obviously, for Corrections Officers, the pretense of avoiding “cruel and unusual” punishment requires them to be a little better at this than a 15 year old boy. And medical professionals (and even veterinary professionals) probably won’t show them how to do it. But practice opportunities would be easy to arrange: just have your incoming class of Corrections Officers do a little blood work on a fellow Corrections Officer, and apply institutional learning.
My family’s veins roll. It’s not unusual to need to be stuck more than once, especially if dehydrated. Anecdotally it’s more common with less experienced phlebotomists.
If the executioner is poorly trained, I could see them missing. Although I would think they’d have to be really poorly trained not to know they missed.
I agree on all counts. This does qualify as “cruel”, and the whole fiasco shows me that the death penalty should be abolished. Life with no parole protects society, so it is sufficient.
Any professional who performs injections or blood draws will tell you that everything you said is simply wrong.
Yes, it’s fairly easy when you have someone with distinct veins that don’t roll. This does yield to practice and experience. But that’s a minority of the population. Most of the population doesn’t have bullseye veins. Working through those situations requires training and experience that CO’s don’t have (because all they do is kill people). Moreover, even an experienced professional will be doing trial and error on certain body types, whether that’s because the veins aren’t visible, they roll, or aren’t supple, or the person has too much bodyfat to make the vein easily visible. Sometimes you can’t avoid the pincushion/windshield-wiper approach.
If you’re not in the vein, there are techniques to verify before you push the drug. If you can’t get into the vein, you can try alternate sites. A medical professional will do all these things to ensure the patient gets the necessary treatment.
I am 100% confident in saying that the CO didn’t do any of this. They didn’t check they were in the vein before they pushed, and the dose went somewhere other than the vein, maybe in a muscle or fascia compartment. They had to halt it because they didn’t know what to do next, and/or they simply hadn’t prepared a backup dose in case something went wrong. That might be due to incompetence, and/or a legit shortage because more manufacturers than ever are declining to provide their drugs for use in lethal injection.
They’ve tried nitrogen gas and apparently the condemned still writhes around, looking like they’re in pain. I think the problem with a chamber is that you can’t have a religious figure at your side, so they use a mask, and the seals aren’t perfect, etc.