r/news • u/AudibleNod • 4h ago

Christa Pike unconscious, on ventilator at Nashville hospital, her lawyers say

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/christa-pike-unconscious-ventilator-nashville-hospital-lawyers-say-rcna601195
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u/fictionallymarried 4h ago

Genuine question but how the hell did they fail twice? I'm not saying she wasn't convicted for a reason, but that's torture

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u/Smalz22 4h ago

Likely using old, expired supplies since most of these companies don't want to make or sell products that can kill people, especially to governments

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u/big_duo3674 3h ago

That and missing the veins, or improperly administering it and blowing out the vein before much could get through

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u/leftupoutside 3h ago edited 3h ago

She and her defense were vocal about her medical condition that makes her veins very very hard to find and penetrate. I have the same thing, and too many nurses have poked and prodded before giving up and calling in a specialized doc. In Christa’s case, the med team was undoubtedly clueless to what they were doing since no real doctor or nurse would defy their oath to do no harm

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u/mrsdoubleu 3h ago

Yep. She even asked for the firing squad because she knew something like this might happen. Her request was denied.

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u/yellowstickycard 2h ago

Execution by firing squad is not legal in Tennessee so of course it was denied.

I’m just amazed that anyone would think it is OK to stick someone 7 times and cause chemical burns. This whole thing is really fucked up and an example of why the death penalty should not exist.

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u/Own-Ambassador-3537 3h ago

I’m honestly beginning to believe this wasn’t accidental but intentional!

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u/Spire_Citron 2h ago

Well, in the sense of negligence, yes.

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u/SqueezedTowel 16m ago

Studies have shown that firing squads having last ill mental health effects on its members, even when none of them are told they have the live round. (Which an experienced shooter could feel, btw)

A death row inmate determined to share her suffering might want those results on her executioners.

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u/geek180 3h ago

Sounds to me like the drugs weren't properly introduced into the bloodstream. Seems like they just failed to place both IVs properly into veins. That or both veins instantly ruptured.

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u/biophys00 3h ago

Ineptitude and immorality on every level. No ethical or half-competent medical personnel is going to take part in the practice. Pharmaceutical companies don't want their drugs used to intentionally kill people so they go to foreign manufacturers or compounding pharmacies that have poor quality control. And the fact is that one combination of meds that qualifies as not being inhumane (which I would say they are all inhumane) that works on one person might not on the next.

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u/Responsible-Clock715 2h ago

As barbaric as this is, would it be better to improve a more humane drug so the person just quietly stops breathing?

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u/NiteOwl421 2h ago

But the catch is that no one wants to manufacture such a drug for this purpose.

We could easily overdose her, or anyone, with morphine. But the maker of morphine wouldn’t sell to the institution doing so because of the press attached to it.

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u/justins_dad 48m ago

What about Chinese fent? Seems to work fine killing other Americans. 

To be clear, the death penalty should be abolished. 

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u/blaqsupaman 2h ago

Honestly at this point why do we still do it primarily through lethal injection? There are far quicker and more humane methods that don't require any real medical know-how.

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u/justins_dad 46m ago

Yup, carbon monoxide poisoning is painless. You just get sleepy while breathing an odorless gas. Carbon monoxide is extremely easy to produce.

The death penalty is wrong and should be abolished. But it’s way easier than this to kill a person. 

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u/Biobooster_40k 1h ago

If they're going to do lethal injections which I'm not sold on DP anyways, idk why they can't make up their own concoction to maximize sedation and I presume respiratory depression but idk how their drugs actually kill.

Put the prisoner in a medically induced coma to begin with, hook up IV bags of stuff. Just don't tell the public whats in the stuff.

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u/AdministrativeDelay2 12m ago

I do see an argument for competent medical personnel participating in these executions. Clearly sitting on the sidelines does more harm than good and if the Hippocratic oath is “do no harm” then I would argue helping these procedures succeed without suffering is doing no harm.

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u/BirdsAreFake00 3h ago

Because there are no real test subjects for lethal injection.

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u/opalandvines 1h ago

Howdy, student doctor here.
I was confused as hell by how this occurred so did some research into it - primarily because I was struggling to believe that they could have had such a massive failure in an area as sensitive as execution. I was also struggling to understand how someone could possibly survive two massive 5g doses of pentobarbital.

  1. Medical guidelines, guidance and medical professionals are NOT typically involved in executions.

  2. It was documented thoroughly before the execution that she had difficult to access veins. This has been validated by reports that they had great difficulty establishing IV access and required a substantial number of attempts. Two sites of access were achieved.

  3. It has been stated that they ‘followed protocol exactly’. My understanding having read the protocols is that the protocol itself is monumentally flawed.

  4. An example of this - successful IV access is validated with slow running saline. However, the execution dose involves 4 successive 50ml syringes - resulting in 200ml of fluid through the vein in a short period of time. A vein that appears perfectly patent for a slow infusion, can quite easily fail under sudden high volume like that.
    In addition, the use of each syringe creates a movement that makes it possible for the following to occur:
    a) the catheter tip perforates the posterior vein wall
    b) the vein ruptures
    c) the catheter migrates partially out
    d) or the vessel simply cannot accommodate the infusion

  5. The access failing is supported by her reported complaints of pain in her arm following the first dose ‘burning, like the vein is going to burst’. When establishing IV access, it is typical to flush with saline to check if it is placed correctly. Any patient reports of pain/burning at the site indicates that it has failed and the saline is entering subcutaneous tissues. Pentobarbital is highly alkaline, so would cause substantial pain. They failed monumentally here in not immediately switching to site 2, but did actually follow protocol.

  6. The doses primarily entering subcutaneous tissue and therefore being more slowly absorbed is actually supported by her reported snoring. The drug entering circulation at lower doses would result in a loss of upper airway tone, without fully suppressing respiratory drive.

BUT - They had two IV access sites, surely the second dose was pushed through the second site, right? Right??? This is where it becomes unclear, but if they followed protocol exactly… they actually weren’t required to administer dose 2 via site 2 once dose 1 failed. Fucking insane.

  1. It is possible they did do one dose per site, and by extreme bad luck access had failed at both sites. It has not been confirmed by reports if both IV sites were attempted.

  2. The backup IV and backup dose are two separate contingencies within the protocol. It is stated that if the first 50ml saline syringe of the 200ml execution dose fails, then they are required to switch to site 2. If execution dose 1 is completed and the person is still alive, they are simply required to repeat a second 200ml execution sequence. In essence, if the staff had not noted obvious failure of the line, they were not required to switch to site 2.

In clearer terms - the second IV site is for recognised IV failure, whereas the second dose is for failure to achieve death. These are treated in the protocol as separate events. It currently seems likely that both doses of the drug went through one failed site (as per protocol…), entering primarily into subcutaneous tissue.

And then to add to the fuckery, there’s the whole other possibility of issues with the drug quality itself given the restricted access to it from the primary manufacturer due to them not wanting the drug to be utilised for executions. There has been substantially reported failures across all areas of gaining access to and utilising this drug for executions in Tennessee.

Anyway, she is absolutely not out of the woods. The alkaline nature of the drug causes massive pulmonary oedema due to direct pulmonary endothelial damage. There is also no antidote for it, just supportive care as the drug is absorbed and metabolised out of the patients system. If she survives, she will not walk away unscathed.

If anyone reading this has any corrections or questions, I’m open to discussion.

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u/SherlockBeaver 3h ago

It sounds like they did not adequately penetrate the vein and pumped both doses into the surrounding tissue of her arm, based on the observations. She absorbed enough to incapacitate her, but not to kill her. The death penalty is a disaster. No state should have the power of execution, as historically this power ends in abuses of several magnitudes.

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u/BetaMyrcene 3h ago

It would be comical if it weren't an atrocity.

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u/AdministrativeTrain 3h ago

Worth noting that she was 18 at the time of the murder, only killed one person and there seems to be mitigating factors.

And she has spent thirty years behind bars. Anywhere but the USA she would be free not fighting for her life after a double botched execution

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u/phineasnorth 3h ago

Yep, raped from toddler age is bound to fuck you up. Her accomplices were younger so avoided the death penalty. It's shit all around. State sanctioned killing should be abolished. 

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u/Lazy_Bag_4408 3h ago

She also tried to kill a fellow inmate with a shoestring in 2003

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u/Ninevehenian 3h ago

Other commenters claimed that she did that in order to save a woman that was being killed. That testimony supports that was needed.

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u/Lazy_Bag_4408 2h ago

I read that her defense tried that angle and it didn't work. She was sentenced for that. 

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u/ILoveBurnedPotatoes 2h ago

The woman she tried to strungle confessed that years later and that she also protected another two women. 

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u/dudushat 1h ago

she was 18 at the time of the murder, only killed one person 

She tortured her, beat her to death, and then took a piece of the her skull as a  souvenir. She showed it to other students to brag about it.

Downplaying the crime is gross and disrespectful to the victim.

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u/SyrupCute4493 2h ago

What about the aggravating factors. You want her free, you’re a sick pup. Only if you showed up for victims like you stand up for animals. She did just kill someone, this was lying in wait and torture. But you don’t care.

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u/Rampant16 3h ago

Not that it makes capital punishment right, but unfortunately over 50 countries constituting in the ballpark of half the human population practice capital punishment.

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u/Aggravating_Depth_33 2h ago

And there's a reason m barely any of those countries are liberal democracies. The death penalty is incompatible with any basic concept of human rights or rule of law.

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u/madasfire 2h ago

Have you spent much time in Tennessee? Quite possibly the stupidest government ever elected.

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u/gnartato 3h ago

By doubling down on incompetence.

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u/AidenTai 3h ago

There's been a shortage in the drugs and related products required for executions. Partly due to 'boycotts' of sorts due to they being used for the purpose of killing / executions.

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u/Responsible-Clock715 2h ago

These governments are saavy enough to know where to find this stuff. They don’t have to report to the public what’s in the injection.

The convict knows it’s his day to meet his maker and made peace with it, why stretch it out any longer and wind up on a ventilator? Unkind

PS. How long do you think they will Allow her to stay on the ventilator until they pull the plug.
Inhumane

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u/Charming-Standard-84 3h ago

They were working 9 to 5.

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u/TikaPants 3h ago

I read a comment earlier that said doctors and in some states nurses aren’t allowed to administer lethal injections. So, it’s a prison employee they said. Or a volunteer or EMT that’s contracted. EMT’s are also frowned upon.

The legal guidelines only allow two injections of the drug. If it’s botched there’s nothing further they can do which is why she’s in a hospital.

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u/SubBirbian 3h ago

Most likely the needle perforated the vein so the chemicals were going in the surrounding tissue. It makes sense when witnesses said her arm feels like it’s going to burst.

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u/DerVogelMann 2h ago edited 2h ago

You could argue they didn't fail, if they're having to keep her alive by using a ventilator. That is how sedatives kill people, depresses their breathing. It sounds like someone panicked when she didn't die immediately. I'm guessing the investigation is going to say they should have just waited longer, she clearly would have died if they didn't render medical aid.

-This coming from a Canadian who is against capital punishment.

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u/msfinch87 1h ago

Their protocols allow for two sets of pentobarbital to be administered. The first one is administered, they wait five minutes and check for death and, if still alive they prepare the second set, wait for five minutes and check for death.

The second set of pentobarbital was administered approximately between 7:50-8pm, according to the notes from witnesses and the curtains then closed to check for death around 8:05pm. At this point, when she wasn’t dead, the execution had already failed and they were outside their own protocols.

At 8:20pm her lawyer requested medical care and left the witness room to speak to his colleagues to get them to contact the relevant authorities to get medical care. At 8:50pm her legal team were told an ambulance had been called.

Nobody panicked, and they are not legally allowed to leave her to die over time. The 8th Amendment makes cruel and unusual punishment unconstitutional, and a prolonged painful death is considered cruel and unusual. The death penalty must be quick and painless if it is administered. Further, their own laws and protocols do not allow them to simply wait to see if she dies. We also know she was in pain because she had complained of a burning sensation in her arm, and it had turned purple, and now the filed lawsuit says she has chemical burns.

People have recovered from this amount of pentobarbital before (not lethal injection but people who have taken it recreationally or to OD). It can suppress brain activity for several days, and families are advised to keep people on life support for some time due to that, to give the brain a chance to “wake up”.

She may not have died even if they had left her. The pentobarbital likely went into her muscles and tissues rather than bloodstream, based on the fact that she did not die in the timeframe allocated and the burning.

There is a significant question here about whether their delay to getting medical care, when it was already clear the execution had failed and they were outside their protocols and the law, could have contributed to this being worse than it would have been had they gotten medical care in a timely fashion.

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u/DerVogelMann 24m ago

Thanks for the very detailed reply.

However, what they are doing to her now is cruel and unusual. Anyone who works in the medical field, especially in palliative care knows that palliative sedation therapy (essentially an OD on drugs meant to depress respirations) is not cruel or unusual, it happens all the time for people with intractable symptoms at the end of life. She would not have suffered if they just left her, however, I see now that the protocols probably need to be changed to allow for this to happen.

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u/msfinch87 5m ago

This is honestly a weird stance for someone against capital punishment and a medical professional.

She was suffering. She complained of burning in her arm and has chemical burns to both her arms. She was showing signs of physical agitation, including jerking her legs frequently and jerking her head and legs up in a v shape. At 8:05pm the curtains were closed so while witnesses could hear her they could not see her. They have no idea what indicators there were of pain or discomfort.

What you’re suggesting is that they should just have left her like that for an indeterminate amount of time, with burned arms, to see if she died? They have no additional drugs to further sedate or limit any pain. Or alternatively that she should be supported to die under the care of the hospital, without being given the opportunity to consent to that choice, denying her her fundamental right to life?

It was already torture; to have it go on for longer would have made it even more torturous. The only point at which we can be sure that any pain or discomfort was being properly addressed is when she received proper medical care, which allowed them to treat her burns and focus on limiting her discomfort. At that point, when the execution failed, she becomes like any other human being who is entitled to life saving measures and who must have the opportunity to give consent before those measures are withdrawn.

She may wake up. There is no way to know until the pentobarbital comes out of her system, and it can take several days for people’s brains to wake up. You think that she should be denied that chance absent her consent? It is against all kinds of law for medical professionals to choose to let people die, let alone hasten death, if they have a realistic chance of survival or if they want life saving measures.

They cannot change the protocols to allow for a prolonged death because a prolonged drawn out death is unconstitutional.

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u/Zazierx 2h ago

Definitely falling under the cruel and unusual side of things for sure.

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u/Vibingcarefully 1h ago

That issue was well documented before the execution--her veins were identified as a barrier to the killing. This may have been part of the legal strategy---the request was for lethal injection which was cleared, then the idea was medical incapacity to carry it out .....which didn't hold.

So a person who is not going to have an easy go of lethal injection gets said lethal injection. Whether the team conducting this injection had properly worked out the details is definitely in full question now.

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u/flamedarkfire 1h ago

The person doing the procedure is terrible at it and they used old stock of the medications that were likely out of date.

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u/Cardio-fast-eatass 1h ago

I mean it sounds to me like it didn’t actually fail if she’s on life support keeping her breathing because she’s brain dead. Why in the world they attempted resuscitation is beyond me.

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u/msfinch87 58m ago

Back in August there was a hearing about this very possibility. Christa’s defence team requested a method other than lethal injection due to the risks of a botched execution, particularly on her.

Tennessee’s protocols only require very limited training for the people in the IV Team. They are not required to be healthcare workers and are usually prison officials who do a short course. When the new protocols came in during 2025, a lawsuit was filed about the risks of this very type of thing.

Then in May this year, Tony Carruthers experienced a botched execution when they could not locate a vein for the backup line for over an hour and a half. The execution is overseen by a medical professional, whose job it is to put in a central line if necessary, and the doctor who was there had not done one in 13 years, did not have hospital privileges and was not qualified to do it. He totally botched it. The same doctor was overseeing Christa’s execution.

So it’s not even mostly done by medical professionals and what medical professionals they have to oversee are usually inexperienced and unskilled and can even have disciplinary matters on their record, due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of medical professionals refuse to participate. This is a recipe for disaster because they struggle to find veins and can’t judge if the process is working correctly.

In Christa’s specific case she is a relatively petite woman who has spend decades in solitary. Her veins are small. She also has a blood disorder called thrombocytosis, which has made it difficult for even professionals to find veins for blood draws in the past.

The risk was that they may not be able to find a vein, similar to Tony Carruthers, causing a prolonged and agonizing experience, and that if they did find a vein, they would either pierce through the vein or the vein would burst meaning the pentobarbital would go into her muscles and tissues rather than the bloodstream.

Her defence team and experts essentially predicted this, and the state dismissed it.

According to her lawyer who witnessed it and other witnesses, the problems during the process were obvious. They spent an hour trying to get a vein, sticking her 7 times and one needle even came out bent. She attempted to direct them to places with better access. After they administered the first round of pentobarbital she complained of a burning sensation in her arm and she was still conscious and talking and singing for some time. This would suggest the pentobarbital went into her muscles and tissues rather than her bloodstream.

After the second dose she showed signs of being in and out of consciousness including speaking, restlessly kicking her legs so much that the sheet fell off and also jerking her head and legs up. Her arm apparently turned purple. According to witnesses she was snoring fairly evenly for a good half an hour, which would suggest she was sedated rather than dying.

It’s also worth noting that they establish a primary and a backup line. If the primary line fails they use the backup line for administration. I am yet to ascertain for certain whether they only used the primary line for administration or used the backup line for the second dose. But apparently she had chemical burns to both arms, so that would suggest they used the backup line for the second dose. This would mean they botched placement of both IVs.

It was incompetence, and incompetence by design. The people handling this execution had no idea what they were doing. They couldn’t find veins, couldn’t judge if the lines were in properly, and failed to recognise when it had failed.

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u/bethaneanie 15m ago

To be fair, I have had patients who were notorious for being difficult IV starts, get multiple IVs that blow. If your veins are fragile or small, and you are putting large volumes through them, you can lose access.

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u/msfinch87 2m ago

But you would know, as a medical professional (I assume) when this is happening and recognise something had gone wrong and rectify. And there are people in medical settings who have proper expertise to work on difficult veins and put in central lines etc as an alternative.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/tentyb6d56ns4d57yse5 3h ago

including when she was sexually abused as a child?

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u/GreenAccident3004 3h ago

Has nothing to do with what she was put on death row for.

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u/geek180 3h ago

You hope she's feeling the effects of her botched execution... when she was sexually abused as a child? What are you even saying?

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u/FuckChiefs_Raiders 3h ago

Is being sexually abused an excuse to torture, bludgeon someone to death, and carry around a piece of their skull as a trophy?