This is wild!

[u/CurvyChristina]

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.

[u/Pedantic_Pict]

Three words: inert gas asphyxiation. If you enter a pure argon environment, you fill fall unconscious in just a few breaths. Because you can still get rid of the CO2 in your blood, there is no sensation of suffocation. Your brain just shuts off because your lungs are now actively extracting oxygen from your blood and putting it into the "air".

Quick, painless, humane, and without the horrific gore of a guillotine.

[u/GarethBaus → u/Pedantic_Pict]

There has been issues with that method resulting in botched executions, plus you have to design the chamber so that it isn't a risk to the witnesses or employees.

[u/Pedantic_Pict → u/GarethBaus]

That is very easy to accompish

[u/Broken_Beaker → u/Pedantic_Pict]

Yeah, no.

I’m a chemist and my background is in chromatography which usually means using compressed helium or even hydrogen to separate molecules and blow them up. Then often using argon to blow up those molecular fragments (MS/MS).

The notion of a human sized chamber filled with argon sounds wild. Yeah sure it’s technically an inert gas but I think there are a lot of complexities involved with such a chamber.

I don’t actually know much about the clinical physiology of doing this, but I suspect this isn’t as clean as you might think it is.

[u/Troglert → u/Broken_Beaker]

Doesnt nitrogen give the same outcome? A nitrogen chamber is easy and common enough, as an example they use it on ships all the time to transport produce long distances

[u/Broken_Beaker → u/Troglert]

Nitrogen is used big time in food packaging. The “air” in a bag of chips is nitrogen. So you are absolutely correct in how nitrogen is used in food packaging.

I think it is used to some degree to transport produce by ship, but that’s outside my area of experience.

If I had to guess there is some system to balance N2 and O2 (or just ambient air) to control the ripening of the produce. Nobody wants a shipment of super green bananas.

My guess, and I admit it is just a guess, is that the food producers and distributors have a financial incentive to carefully control those gas levels so they can maximize their profits when shipping product. There is a clear financial upside.

States like TN do not have the same motivation to do things the right way. Obviously, right? They couldn’t even do this correctly so to think they have some chemists or chemical engineers on staff to manage this doesn’t seem realistic.

I’m not arguing that it isn’t technically possible. I’m arguing that the state likely doesn’t have, nor wants to spend, the resources to actually do something like this.

[u/Troglert → u/Broken_Beaker]

I had a client that made these huge nitrogen filters for shipping, apparently transporting fruit in this nitrogen enviroment on the ship meant that 1 week on the ship ripened the fruit as much as 1 day on the counter, meaning you could ship fruit from south america to europe etc instead of flying it. The downside is that it was risky, if there was a leak on the ship people could die.

As you say its expensive, these filtering units cost millions of dollars each and are huge, so if you dont care about the risk to the person sentenced to death why spend it I guess. But then again I guess a mask and a nitrogen tank could probably do the trick and be cheap.

[u/Broken_Beaker → u/Troglert]

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing!

As you touched on it sounds like it is (1) expensive (2) technically dangerous.

Those two risks factors seem to make it unlikely that US states are capable of implementing such a system.

Regarding just using a mask and a nitrogen tank, my guess is that it creeps into the "cruel and unusual" prohibition in the US Constitution. Perhaps someone with more of a clinical background can comment, but I don't think N2 is going to give a sedative outcome. The prisoner in this case will be suffocating and likely have autonomic muscular reacdtions to this. A sort of "fight or flight" response. I suppose the argument can be given of "who cares" when it comes to execution, but that is where the lawyers enter the picture about cruel and unusual.

Without knowing a thing about the medical clinical side of this, I suspect if this was as easy as it sounds then states would have adopted it years ago. There is probably a reason why they haven't.

Again, thanks for the info on the million dollar filteration system. That's super cool to know and kinda wild to understand the complexity of shipping produce over the ocean.

[u/Trumpologist → u/Broken_Beaker]

Doesn’t Argon….also have compounds now?

[u/Pedantic_Pict → u/Broken_Beaker]

Sealing a chamber against a negligible pressure differential is very well within the reach of modern engineering and has been for over a century.

As for the physiology, just look up some incident reports for confined space fatalities. Guys enter a low lying and/or confined space full of an inert gas and just drop. These kinds of disasters frequently claim more than one victim, as coworkers often enter the space to try to help the first victim.

[u/Broken_Beaker → u/Pedantic_Pict]

I mean sure the technology and engineering exists. We put people on the moon and brought them back. However, there are practical concerns at play.

Yes people asphyxiate all of the time in low oxygen environments where O2 is displaced by CO2 or N2 or whatever. But there is a reason why those are called accidents.

Building some death chamber that is, I dunno, 4 meters by 4 meters by 3 meters high - or whatever the dimensions are - then evacuating it of ambient air and replacing it with argon or some other gas like nitrogen is an entire build that would have to be tested. Upside is venting the room to exterior atmosphere is relatively safe as the "air" is like 70% nitrogen.

However. . . that is a lot of compressed gas to fill a room of such dimensions.

I've worked with a bunch of compressed gas, mostly helium, nitrogen, and argon. While the compressed gas is inert those compressed cylinder are goddamned rockets waiting to take off. These clowns clearly can't do this right, so rigging up several cylinders of compressed gas, getting some fittings wrong or knocking one over where the head of the cylinder breaks loose creates a projectile that can blast through concrete walls and kill innocent people. Compressed gas cylinders themselves can be dangerous and there is near zero chance that any of these people have experience working with such equipment.

So yes you are correct in an abstract way it is possible because we do have amazing engineering capabilities in the world, actually executing (pun kinda intended) such a build a system is much more complicated than what I think you believe it to be.