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.
Hopefully the use of lethal injection comes to an end. It costs more than 1 million dollars per dose which is just overwhelmingly stupid. They could employ a 5-man firing squad and pay them a year’s worth of wages for less than the cost of a lethal injection, and the bullets would cost less than $100 per execution.
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?
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 know 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.
This is absolutely true, but i would challenge the assertion about making people throw away good meds being bad for business.
The law passed in 1979 requiring manufacturers to provide an expiration date of when they could guarantee a drug was still safe and fully effective did not require that the manufacturers do any long term tests, to establish accurate dates though. Many companies slapped a one year date on the labels and called it a day.
They could guarantee a year with then current testing protocols and if people had to toss their perfectly good meds and buy more, then that would just be good for company profits.
The US military keeps huge stockpiles of medicines on hand. Faced with throwing away millions of dollars of meds every year they commissioned a study.
With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.
Pharmaceutical companies were happy to tellpeople throw away medicines years before they needed to.
I think your only agreeing with me.
Expired pentobarbital likely played a role in the failed execution. Assuming they kept the vials in perfect, dark storage and it’s formulated with stabilizers, it could last a long time, many years, but if any of those perfect conditions for pharmaceutical storage aren’t met, that time drops to a couple years max. I highly doubt prisons have ideal storage for their lethal injection medication, especially because no ethical medical professional will be involved.
Did you even read the article? They blew out her veins and never administered it into her blood stream. Her stating that her arm felt like it was on fire and that the administors were having a hard time pushing saline is proof to the fact. It’s not designed to kill you if it isn’t injected into the blood stream. The old stock 100% had nothing to do with it.
Unless you actually no the shelf life of pentobarbital, that argument isn’t even worth making.
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.
As I’ve started above, that doesn’t necessarily mean it starts going bad after 30 months.
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?
Ideally yes, but
- I know too many medical practitioners that refused to mask up during covid
- I know of workers in medical and social careers that chose it because they want power over other people
- There’s, unsurprisingly, a significant overlap between the above two groups
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.
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
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.
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.
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”
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.
To be fair they aren’t really that wrong with their “it’s not the guns” meme. Lots of Swiss have guns. They don’t have the US problems with gun violence. It really isn’t the guns. US citizen are just generally way worse at controlling their anger than other people.
While the 'cause of the problem may not be guns, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give guns to mentally unstable people.
So that leaves us with either just outright banning guns, because americans have proved they aren’t mentally stable enough to handle guns, or requiring monthly checkups with a psychologist to make sure they should still be allowed access to guns. At the expense of the gun owner of course. Wouldn’t want free mental healthcare for the masses now, that would be unamerican.
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.
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
Why dont you just stop behaving like barbarians and give an end to this practice?
CO2 makes you panic, that would be horrific.
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.
Abolish private prisons. Because there shouldn’t be a profit motive involved in housing inmates.
And yes, abolish the death penalty. Because the state can’t be trusted to get it right, and it’s cheaper to just lock people up for the rest of their lives if necessary.
Most prisons aren’t private. The important “but” is that they still contract a ton of processes out to private businesses, yet another way to turn tax dollars into political favors.
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
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.
If you have a kid I hope the same thing happens to you. You’re such a dumb fuck. Let’s let a murder just go free.
maybe so. but a gov should not be the one to do it.
Dumb as fuck take
howso? is a gov gonna make sure they don’t execute anyone innocent?
Yeah because that’s not something we can figure out. Dumbass take AGAIN you literally must be GED material.
you seem to write like you think the gov has never executed a person wrongly? how’s uncle sam’s boot taste?
Also fuck cops
Never said that just calling you fucking brain dead because all you can do is what about blank!? You put nothing into a conversation you just have dumb as fuck opinion which logically leads me to believe you are also dumb as fuck and probably broke as fuck too because they correlate.
Are you suggesting it be a private company or what?
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.
Eye for an eye isn’t bullshit. It’s saying to always make sure the punishment is proportional to the crime. Before that you’d get people being punished much more harshly than their crime could possibly justify. We still do, of course, but we used to as well.
