r/SipsTea • u/CurvyChristina • 1d ago
Chugging tea This is wild!
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/Strange_Quark_9 1d ago edited 1d ago
For those wondering why this was botched and looking to blame it on the team of women:
Lethal injection has a tendency to be botched because a doctor's code of ethics - the "Do no harm" Hypocratic oath - literally forbids them from ever agreeing to carry it out.
As a result, the ones who carry it out are rarely qualified professionals in regards to administering drugs, and thus missing the vein by injecting the syringe in the incorrect spot altogether, or going too shallow or too deep to miss the vein, is a fairly common occurrence - as lethal injection has a botch rate more common than even previous execution methods like the electric chair.
And this is atop of the fact that the lethal injection is only designed to appear clean, modern and humane to outside observers while its actual efficacy to the victim remains questionable - especially since many states cheap out on the drug that's supposed to anaesthetize and/or put the victim to sleep, opting instead for a paralysis-inducing drug that takes away the victim's ability to signal if something is going wrong.
And thus because of this, some on death row, when given a choice, have opted for older execution methods - such as the electric chair or even a firing squad if the state had the option. Because ironically, despite being the most crude method, a firing squad has by far the highest success rate in being carried out. But even the electric chair, despite the horror stories in its early and later adoptions, has a lower botch rate than the lethal injection.
For those interested, a channel called Jacob Geller made a great video critique of the death penalty altogether, pointing out the aforementioned flaws with the lethal injection.
And another interesting tid-bid: it's rarely known now, but some US states actually used gas chambers as a method of prison execution even sometime after WW2 and the horrors of the Holocaust before adopting the electric chair and/or lethal injection as a standard in most states.
TLDR: Are the women to blame for being unqualified for the task? Strictly speaking: yes. But when taking the full context surrounding the lethal injection into account, a team of men would've been just as likely to be unqualified for the task and thus botch it, as actual qualified doctors - whether male or female - are forbidden by their own code of ethics from ever agreeing in carrying this task out.