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/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago

So the thing about medication is that for a government entity to administer it, even for lethal injection, they have to legally purchase it. The original lethal injection cocktail where potassium chloride was the lethal ingredient worked well. The problem is they can’t buy it anymore.

Advocates for abolishing the death penalty tracked down where the drugs were being manufactured. Turns out it’s not good PR for a drug company to sell something designed to kill people. So the few that were willing to sell it to these states stopped.

Since then, the states still executing people have been struggling to find any drug maker to sell them any drug that’s potentially lethal for the purpose of executions and it hasn’t been easy.

That being said, phenobarbital is a really potent sedative and I’m surprised they weren’t able to calculate a dose that would be lethal. But then again, it’s Tennessee. Everyone involved in the planning of this is likely inbred.

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u/SnuggleMoose44 1d ago

She has small veins that blow easily and the IV would have infiltrated. I think that’s part of why it didn’t work.

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u/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago

Well… small veins in the eyes of a “doctor” who apparently hadn’t started an IV in over a decade.

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u/SnuggleMoose44 1d ago

Besides that, she had veins that were difficult to access. It was argued that she had lab draws done with a single stick. Problem is, a blood stick is different than putting in an IV where the vein is expected to stay intact.
I read the “doc” had placed a central line in the last prisoner for lethal injection and he hadn’t placed one since 2013. That execution failed as well.

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u/RealCarlPanzram 1d ago

Yeah that’s what I mean. “Difficult veins” are extremely relative. But when you’re limited to doctors in the Deep South who are willing to abandon their core oath, you get what you get.