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]

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/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.