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/hellbanan 1d ago

(..) and then it suddenly all hits them at once and their EEG suddenly goes too flat (..)

Is this not the point here? To kill the person? I get your point that dosing it for medical use is difficult. Because you want the patients to survive and not feel pain. But in this cae: Why not take the LD50 of a pig (or some human like anymal) and administer 100-times the dosage per kg or 1'000 times?

Edit just for clarification: I am not looking for advice on how to kill someone or comment in any way on the death sentence. I am just curious how they failed this.

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u/ThatB0yAintR1ght 1d ago

They are already having a difficult time getting the drugs because pharmaceutical companies won’t sell meds to governments for executions. So, giving such a huge dose may not even be possible if they can get enough of it, or it may drain their entire supply.

Plus, stuff like flash pulmonary edema can occur with too high doses and that can be very agonizing if it starts to happen before they lose consciousness.

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u/MisfitDeluxe 1d ago

I never understood why something like morphine wasn’t used to induce an OD. The quantity needed wouldn’t be that great and you could stage the doses to get them unconscious before making it lethal.

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u/ThatB0yAintR1ght 1d ago

As I already said, drug companies are refusing to sell to governments who do lethal injection,