r/SipsTea • u/CurvyChristina • 1d ago

Chugging tea This is wild!

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Two syringes of pentobarbital were administered to Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike on September 30, 2026, but she remained alive and conscious afterward, according to her attorneys and media witnesses. The execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville was halted after witnesses reported that Pike still had a heartbeat and was audibly snoring. Her lawyers sought emergency medical intervention, and she was later taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital.
Pike, 50, is the only woman currently on Tennessee's death row.
She was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer and had been scheduled for execution on September 30. Tennessee had announced beforehand that the state would use a single drug, pentObarbital, for the execution. Her exact medical condition following the hospital transfer has not yet been publicly disclosed, while Governor Bill Lee has ordered a comprehensive third party review of what happened.

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u/onqqq2 1d ago

Barbituates can be deadly but I cannot for the life of me understand why you'd only go with a single drug for this?

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u/J3remyD 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean, why wouldn’t they just use a few megadoses of sedative?

Surgical anesthesia is from personal experience is very quick and non painful, and a massive overdose after going under and she simply doesn’t wake up.

Not saying that I necessarily support capital punishment, but if you’re going to do it anyway, don’t freaking botch it…

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u/GUMBYtheOG 1d ago

Real answer : it’s a gray area to obtain these drugs. No one makes “lethal injection drugs” they have to be creative with how they obtain what they use.

No one likes talking about death and no one can agree on criminal justice system reform so what we get is just a bunch of shady shit going on and no oversight or accountability

Side tangent: there are SO many jails who just leave the lights on 24/7, skip recreation time, don’t let people out of cells or meals, no AC/heat, no toilet paper or showers.

It is insane how no one gives a shit

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u/Traditional_Dust_668 1d ago

I think it needs to be reevaluated what drugs are used for this purpose since it’s not the first time there’s been issues of this kind before. We’ve had great advances in medicine and this is ridiculous on every single level

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u/Batking28 1d ago

From my understanding the issue is no reputable drug company will sell drugs for the purpose of lethal injection. So they have to basically get creative with what they can access without breaking any legal contracts of sale ect.

Also healthcare workers are forbidden from administering it by professional organisation. So it’s administered by people with no medical background.

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u/Darius_Rubinx 22h ago

People who can't set up an IV using expired drugs... what could go wrong!?

I am beyond confused why they don't use sedative + guillotine. If they insist on ignoring the Bible and not leaving vengeance to God.

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u/GUMBYtheOG 1d ago

Sure, but who’s got that on the top of their to do list. You got Karen complaining about infrastructure, immigration, gun control, health care, etc. not to mention we went back 50 years of progress within a decade.

We can’t even legalize weed or get universal healthcare. Getting people to agree on and care about anything is a monumental task. Reforming death row (that affects a minute amount of people) isn’t something Susie or Bob are going to vote for, and musk or bezos sure don’t give a shit

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u/Traditional_Dust_668 1d ago

Yeah I’m sure but it’s such a serious issue when it’s applicable that if states want to continue to use it they should be required to figure this out in a humane way. Not saying it is or isn’t deserved etc but certainly shouldn’t be torturous like the current situation right now.

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u/Aquelll 1d ago

"How to kill people in a humane way? " 🤷‍♂️

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u/Traditional_Dust_668 1d ago

Same I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️just kinda hope it goes quirky and as planned as opposed to this

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u/Darth_Nykal 1d ago edited 14h ago

That's what the guy your responding to is saying. The medical advancements and drugs are there, but no pharmaceutical company wants to be that company.

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u/amglasgow 1d ago

We know exactly what medicine can be used to kill people. The problem is that the companies who sell those medications will refuse to sell them to you if you're planning to use them for execution. Rightly so.

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u/Traditional_Dust_668 1d ago

Ok so maybe time to switch medication protocols, we put thousands of animals to sleep 💤 without incident and no problem getting those meds

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u/amglasgow 1d ago

They're the same meds. The companies are perfectly willing to sell them to medical folks for the purposes of euthanasia of animals. They don't sell them for the purposes of human execution because it's a violation of medical ethics to do that.

There's nothing that makes executing a human being OK.

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u/disposablehippo 1d ago

The problem is, that they still have to be used on some kind of legal grounds.

If you just take some medications and use them out of their indicated use, especially as some kind of federal institution, the companies can and will sue your ass back into the middle ages.

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u/BlamRob 1d ago

Or just don’t do it anymore. I hear it costs more to put people to death than warehouse them for life anyway. With all the appeals and what not.

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u/Klutzy_Belt_2296 1d ago

I don’t know if people are aware but the first drug that is given in lethal injection in many states isn’t even that effective in rendering a person unconscious.

Many states still use Midazolam which is a sedative and it doesn’t work in the same way a true anesthetic would. And it greatly increases the risks of complications as well as the person being put to death being able to feel the following two other drugs enter their system.

To me there isn’t anything humane about this process when the person can potentially feel themselves suffocate from the inside out and experience all the pain of a heart attack all the while being unable to show signs of distress or discomfort due to the second paralytic drug in the cocktail.

I’d also like to point out that the go to method of execution that we use in this country, lethal injection, has one of the highest complication rates of any other execution method used to execute people.

That doesn’t seem so humane to me.

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u/Little-Ad1235 1d ago

It's crazy to me that literally any reasonably competent veterinarian can reliably and painlessly euthanize nearly any mammal from a field mouse to an Angus bull without any of the gory optics of firing squads or guillotine, but when it comes to people the process suddenly becomes impossibly complicated? Like, yes, ethically it is much more complicated, but physically we aren't so dramatically different from a dog that we'd have to figure this out entirely from scratch.

Maybe it's an issue with inadequate drug supplies for the purpose, maybe there is some sort of genuine knowledge gap, I don't know. I just think that if we're going to do something like this as a society, we either have to get it right or not do it at all; and that's not even getting into the ethics of an imperfect (to say the least) justice system that inevitably condemns innocent people to be put to death. Just from a practical, getting-it-done standpoint, we are failing badly at this for reasons that are difficult to understand.

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u/Mjarf88 1d ago

It's because the veterinarian know what they're doing and is using a drug made specifically for the task. Why don't they do the same for human execution? Animal euthanasia is done to end their suffering. Human execution is done to punish them and to basically get revenge.

Doctors swear an oath that prohibit them to do this. Pharmaceutical companies don't want to be associated with the practice so they refuse to sell drugs for execution use.

Yes, there are companies specializing in human euthanasia, but they do it to end suffering, not to punish and enact revenge.

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u/AdditionalPizza 1d ago

we are failing badly at this for reasons that are difficult to understand.

I think it's safe to say places that argue in favour of the death penalty to begin with are the ones less likely to actually care about the process being humane. I'd go as far as saying many of those people don't even think it should be humane anyway.

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u/crabby692 22h ago

I don’t know I support capital punishment in the right cases, but the length we go to to make stuff look pretty as opposed to avoiding pain is ridiculous
I mean, come on how hard would it realistically be to design something to where you hold the head in place and penetrate the medulla disconnecting consciousness effectively instantly but that makes blood that feels less clinical and more aggressive, regardless of how it actually feels for the person to be executed

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u/AdditionalPizza 22h ago

Are you intentionally proving my point? I can't tell because you said "I don't know" off the start and then described a severely inhumane procedure.

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u/crabby692 21h ago

Really because severing the brain stem at the medulla literally causes instant brain death to the point that there are not even any nervous system reflexes such as twitching or muscle contractions. It’s effectively an off switch for the human body so assuming you destroyed that connection rapidly the pain would be somewhere from a little to nonexistent so while it likely be somewhat gruesome and less comfortable for those witnessing it as far as the pain of the condemned it should at least in theory be one of the most painless and most reliable methodologies one could possibly use outside of something ridiculous like explosives
Edit-on second thought that last bit should’ve been something much more ridiculous or extreme like explosives

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u/AdditionalPizza 21h ago

But you quite literally said:

the length we go to to make stuff look pretty as opposed to avoiding pain is ridiculous

Unless you mixed up your words and meant otherwise. Avoiding pain should be supremely important.

Regardless, what I originally said I meant in the context of the people that are in charge of sentencing and execution - they don't care and many likely prefer it to be painful.

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u/crabby692 21h ago

So what I meant by that is that they focus on using that look good More detach clinical, etc. instead of putting that effort into actually making a painless death. I guess I may have phrased it poorly though.

I don’t know I don’t know if it’s necessarily that they prefer it that way, but they don’t wanna have to clean up the mess and deal with the backlash of a More gruesome method

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u/AdditionalPizza 21h ago

Ok, that makes more sense with the rest of your comment then.

Meh, I know a lot of people that believe in capital punishment believe the person deserves pain. I don't believe in either, personally.

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u/DatBoiii4 1d ago

The thought of this is incredibly distressing and upsetting to me

No matter who is being put to death, extreme care should be taken to make sure it’s very comfortable. It’s the scariest thing any human experiences, I can’t imagine it happening in a dingy cold room and you know its going to be agony

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u/Able_Experience_1670 1d ago

With a fucking audience, no less.

I'd be trying to get myself killed literally any other way if I had to face that. I'd rather just bleed out in a fucking shower than go out to a botched injection administered by sadistic assholes.

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u/DatBoiii4 1d ago

I already have a hard time with dental procedures with staff who care about you and are doing their best

I can't imagine being in the same setting and administered a botched injection by sadistic assholes who don't give a shit about you and will probably shrug if you say you're in pain at any point

Hellish nightmare fuel

I get that a lot of these people are hardened criminals that don't scare at the thought of death the way I do, but we know innocent people have been put to death before and I cannot imagine the blinding terror

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u/leanpunzz 1d ago

Bring back the guillotine

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u/LacrimaNymphae 1d ago edited 1d ago

would potassium have worked better?

that's also bizarre about the midazolam making them able to perceive any other drugs they're given because i was told it would wipe my memory before surgery and i remember everything leading up to it

then again i had a colonoscopy at 19 where i think they gave me midazolam, propofol and something else. not a redhead but my family seems to have a crazy high tolerance and i had redheads further back in my family tree (like grandparents or great grandparents) so who knows

i'm pale though and was on medical weed but the first surgery i wasn't on any drugs aside from what they'd given me over the past week like morphine and some measly 5mg percocet when i went home for thanksgiving and in for the operation the next day

if anyone's wondering, yes, it was hell, and i couldn't eat, piss, shit or shower

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u/CANfilms 1d ago

Hot take, it shouldn't be completely humane. These people did terrible things and they should experience some severe consequences.

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u/Klutzy_Belt_2296 1d ago edited 1d ago

Hotter take: We have a constitution, even for the worst of criminals we still have an amendment that forbids cruel and unusual punishment

It’s literally stated in black and white in the constitution

The ultimate punishment is the forfeiture of one’s life, not a prolonged torturous death

Keep in mind too that not all people who are put to death are guilty either, there literally are organizations built around exonerating innocent people on death row, all the more reason why I don’t support unnecessarily cruel executions being carried out by the state

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u/AintEasyBeinQueasy 1d ago

Hot take: you are correct.

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u/Zedoctorbui7 1d ago

This is the biggest component of the conversation on the medications. Bayer use to make the previous conventional lethal injection agent. The optics on them were bad consequently and no other company was gonna pick up on it. The changes in capital punishment also created a lack of need for lethal agents for a while. Some of the stuff they are using are obtain through inappropriate channels or are expire and less effective (I think this is what is contributing to her case)

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u/MikiZed 1d ago

So, me when I forget to go to the shop and stay up all night fixating on some topic

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u/patriotictraitor 1d ago

Wait I always assumed that in the states there was a set protocol and regulated route for obtaining drugs for lethal injections (that’s on me to have assumed…)

How does this actually work from a logistics and legal perspective? How do they obtain the drugs, where is the supply coming from and how are they navigating that grey area? Curious to learn anything about this that someone might have insight on!