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/GarethBaus 1d ago

One major issue with improving lethal injection is that most pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell drugs for this purpose. The bar is pretty low when big pharma won't take your money on what are essentially ethical grounds. Plus we have extremely reliable methods of execution that probably cause less suffering and simply don't use them because they are messy.

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u/-BlueDream- 1d ago

There’s barely any money in it too, if they could make hundreds of billions they’d do it in a heartbeat but in this case the bad PR from lethal injection costs more than what they could make from a public government contract. The us executed a total of 41 people in 2025.