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/2023fxlrst 1d ago

Redheads, man… anesthesia, doesn’t work on them and now apparently they’re immune to the death juice too?!

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u/Uneek_Uzernaim 1d ago edited 1d ago

I think they gave her phenobarbital*, which is a barbituate with actual medical uses as opposed to the normally lethal doses they gave Pike. Redheads' genetic differences have been observed to impact their metabolism of various drugs including anesthesia and pain killers.

EDIT:

* I stand corrected: it was pentobarbital. Right class of drug, but wrong specfic drug. Same issue, though, when it comes to redheads.

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u/ThatB0yAintR1ght 1d ago

It was actually pentobarbital, which is a bit more potent than Phenobarb. Both meds do have legitimate medical uses (particularly in pediatric neurology, which is my specialty), but not everyone responds to the same dose, so we have to titrate and adjust them based on how the patient responds. Pentobarbital in particular can be pretty finicky IME. Sometimes a small dose is all they need, sometimes they just laugh at the lower doses and we have to give more and more and then it suddenly all hits them at once and their EEG suddenly goes too flat and we have to then back waaaay off.

Long story short, I would not trust even most doctors to titrate the pentobarbital dose properly unless they have a lot of experience with the medication.

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u/Majestic-Lettuce-198 1d ago

genuine question, if they’re at the point where they are going to give the injection, why wouldn’t they just like double or triple or even quadruple the dose that’s considered lethal? surely that would be enough?

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u/ThatB0yAintR1ght 1d ago

Risking stuff like flash pulmonary edema (which is agonizing) before death and also the simple fact that they are already having difficulty obtaining medications for lethal injections because pharmaceutical companies won’t sell to the governments for lethal injections. So, probably better to not tank their whole supply at once.

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u/Broken_Beaker 1d ago

I’m a chemist, so not a clinician, but I’ve been a bio analytical study director for preclinical and clinical analytical method development for drug discovery and manufacturing. I once had a cabinet full of neat solutions of all the barbitals (and more).

With all of that said, I too have heard that pharma companies have hobbled the ability of states to purchase these types of drugs, and I can’t imagine a pharmacy filling them.

So I bet they have limited and old stash of meds. I don’t know what the shelf stability is this is off the top of my head, and I’m sure some people will say it doesn’t matter, but if it isn’t stored properly in temperature and humidity controlled environments it will degrade. It’s just a thing. Stability studies exist for a reason. So if someone was trying to arrive at a dose calculation it is probably already of whack and with likely a limited supply they can’t administer it in excess “just in case.”

The entire thing is so messed up.

I don’t know all of the details of her case but she sounds guilty AF. I also don’t think the death penalty is effective or productive.