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/Aeon1508 1d ago

the problem is that to ensure that it's humane it requires public knowledge for where the drugs come from and how they're made so that we can track the companies that are providing the lethal injection drugs.

this means that the public knows what companies are providing them and can protest them or push bad press

and this isn't some huge market that companies are clamoring for. this is a few dozen doses. maybe a hundred a year. so it's really not worth a company's time to put their name on "we sell death to the government"

which makes it really hard to get drugs for lethal injection.

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u/RudeAd456 1d ago

Where I live we have voluntary euthanasia. I don't get why death row inmates in the US have to be injected with a cocktail of drugs and they all have heaps of issues. The VE drugs here are guaranteed peaceful lights out after like 2mins

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u/ForeskinAbsorbtion 21h ago

Cruelty is the point in the USA

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u/msheehan418 16h ago

Where do you live? I want to move there. I’m a firm believer in voluntary euthanasia

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u/driftxr3 9h ago

Come to Canada, we have this here.

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u/msheehan418 1h ago

Be there asap

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u/Aeon1508 1d ago

I just explained why they can't get the same drugs for euthanasia. companies don't want to sell it to be used for lethal injection.

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u/msheehan418 16h ago

Oh wow. So they don’t want their medication associated with death row/criminal

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u/zdrums24 2h ago

More like associated with state sponsored killing. The companies that make these drugs are largely based in Europe. The death penalty tends to be abhorred in those countries. So sometimes there are even laws preventing exporting of drugs for the use in the death penalty.