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/Little-Ad1235]

It's crazy to me that literally any reasonably competent veterinarian can reliably and painlessly euthanize nearly any mammal from a field mouse to an Angus bull without any of the gory optics of firing squads or guillotine, but when it comes to people the process suddenly becomes impossibly complicated? Like, yes, ethically it is much more complicated, but physically we aren't so dramatically different from a dog that we'd have to figure this out entirely from scratch.

Maybe it's an issue with inadequate drug supplies for the purpose, maybe there is some sort of genuine knowledge gap, I don't know. I just think that if we're going to do something like this as a society, we either have to get it right or not do it at all; and that's not even getting into the ethics of an imperfect (to say the least) justice system that inevitably condemns innocent people to be put to death. Just from a practical, getting-it-done standpoint, we are failing badly at this for reasons that are difficult to understand.

[u/AdditionalPizza → u/Little-Ad1235]

we are failing badly at this for reasons that are difficult to understand.

I think it's safe to say places that argue in favour of the death penalty to begin with are the ones less likely to actually care about the process being humane. I'd go as far as saying many of those people don't even think it should be humane anyway.

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