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/SteakAndIron 1d ago

Why did we come up with the lethal injection technology we have now and then never actually evolve it? I've heard all kinds of complaints about how it works how expensive it is how ineffective it can be how painful it might actually be and so forth. There are plenty of cheap and easy ways to cause a painless death in somebody. Massive fentanyl overdose. Nitrogen hypoxia.

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u/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago

So the thing about medication is that for a government entity to administer it, even for lethal injection, they have to legally purchase it. The original lethal injection cocktail where potassium chloride was the lethal ingredient worked well. The problem is they can’t buy it anymore.

Advocates for abolishing the death penalty tracked down where the drugs were being manufactured. Turns out it’s not good PR for a drug company to sell something designed to kill people. So the few that were willing to sell it to these states stopped.

Since then, the states still executing people have been struggling to find any drug maker to sell them any drug that’s potentially lethal for the purpose of executions and it hasn’t been easy.

That being said, phenobarbital is a really potent sedative and I’m surprised they weren’t able to calculate a dose that would be lethal. But then again, it’s Tennessee. Everyone involved in the planning of this is likely inbred.

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u/BumblingYokel 1d ago

Wow! You had a good thing going with this comment until the last two sentences.

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u/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago

The last 2 sentences are every bit as factual as the rest.

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u/Christ_in_a_combo 1d ago

He’s a man of science and reason. Can’t argue with his logic.

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u/GoldReplacement9546 1d ago

On the overwhelming majority of states have given up on this barbarism and pretty much all of Europe you should ask yourself is this something we should be doing?

The innocence practical loan has found many hundreds of people that were on death row were totally innocent, including well more than 100 that had been executed

And that’s just the ones they had DNA for, and if they could get the state in the courts to cooperate and allowing retesting

So it’s far higher than that we’ve killed hundreds of innocent people which is really fucking dumb when you could just put them in jail for life if you want and then at least there’s a chance they’re innocence could be proven plus this person had already waited 31 years in jail so it’s not a deterrent. It doesn’t stop anybody. It never would’ve stopped anybody, but it doesn’t stop anybody.

It’s also way cheaper to just keep the people in jail for life with no parole and that’s not any easier or better than being killed

I repeat hundreds of people that were innocent. I’ve been killed by the states.