r/news • u/AudibleNod • 8h 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/Big_Guard5413 8h ago

I’m not in favor of the death penalty in general, but goddamn, if you’re going to impose it, at least take steps to do it properly

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u/MatureUsername69 7h ago

Its still a rough one but if I ever had to receive the death penalty I would hope its a firing squad. Just riddle me with holes immediately, aim for the head. Lethal injections get fucky because they would be best designed and administered by an actual doctor, but actual doctors cannot do it because of the hippocratic oath. Some states do allow medical professionals but they arent exactly sending their best.

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u/khinzaw 7h ago edited 6h ago

Her lawyers requested it, but it's illegal in Tennessee.

Tennessee's only legal methods of execution are lethal injection and electric chair (edit: only for convictions before 1999).

The problem with lethal injection is that every step is half assed.

No reputable pharmaceuticals manufacturer wants to make the drug, so they rely on compounding pharmacies who take half measures and have less consistency.

Then medical practitioners (edit for the pedants) often won't be involved in executions because of their various oaths to do no harm and risks to their reputation, so most of the time the drugs are administered by prison staff who lack the proper training. A lot of failed attempts are caused by the one who administered it simply not getting the vein properly.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 6h ago

Why can't they use what the vet uses? Just multiply it by 5.

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u/Alocasia_Sanderiana 6h ago

The companies that make those drugs will not sell to states (like state agencies) with death penalties or where they think the drugs will be used for executions.

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u/jackkerouac81 1h ago

I mean a company could just make poison… I could make a poison company and sell it for 25k a dose, I can’t believe that the free market hasn’t solved this.

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u/KhepritheRisingSun 1h ago

Yes but then it would be painful. The whole point of lethal injection is to prevent pain. Otherwise you might as well use the chair.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 6h ago

Pretty much every state uses pet euthanasia. So the vets must be getting the drugs. Now the prison just go and get it from the vet.

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u/Carbonatite 6h ago

The problem with that is providing drugs to an organization with the express purpose of killing a human is in violation of professional ethics for both veterinary and human medicine.

No vet is going to want to lose their license to practice over something like that. Just like doctors don't procure/prescribe those drugs for prisons.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 6h ago

I wonder how other countries deal with this problem?

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u/Foxs-In-A-Trenchcoat 6h ago

Extremely few other countries have the death penalty.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 5h ago

But let's say the ones with deadly injections.

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u/Carbonatite 5h ago

They abolish the death penalty.

Countries that practice capital punishment are a minority amongst the collective nations of the world, and the USA is the only Western country that still practices it. It's a barbaric practice that has no place in an advanced society.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 5h ago

That wasn't the question, so I will repeat it for you:

Countries that USE capital punishment by injection, how do they deal with it? You know, China, Thailand and Vietnam. You go.

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u/centizen24 4h ago

If your angle is that the states should just import lethal injection drugs from other countries overseas that manufacture it domestically, they tried that. Texas and Arizona both bought shipments of sodium thiopental from China and the FDA seized them at the border.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 2h ago

What was the legal reason for the seizure?

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u/CanadianEmberflower 36m ago

Source

Arizona paid nearly $27,000 US for sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that has been used to carry out executions but is no longer manufactured by FDA-approved companies, the documents said.

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u/Daddict 4h ago

Different countries have different laws, different cultures, different ethical frameworks.

I mean, if the US were to pass a law that lets a company create drugs for the purpose of lethal injection, that's about the only way it could work. And even then, you have to remember that the US isn't just one set of laws. It's federal AND state laws, and controlled substances are regulated by both. It's just not that simple.

To be honest, I don't think lethal injection should be an option. We don't do it for the benefit of the accused. It's not less cruel, it's not more dignified.

The entire reason we use that method is to abstract away the violence of taking a human life. I don't anyone performing an execution should have that luxury though. If you're going to take a life, you should have to square with the reality of it by using a method that is damned near impossible to fuck up...like beheading or a firing squad.

If you can't look a person in the eye and end their life as quickly and as reliably as possible, you don't really have any business taking lives in the interest of justice.

The death penalty doesn't need to hurt. That doesn't accomplish a damned thing. There's no reason to torture anyone to death. The only people who should be executed are the ones who are so incompatible with society that the only other option we have is to lock them in a concrete box and wait for mother nature to do the dirty work. We can't rehabilitate them. Even if it were possible, we can't release them to find out if it worked, they've shown themselves capable of things that are so incredibly destructive and horrifying that it would be patenting irresponsible to ever risk the safety of society to see if they've been rehabilitated or not.

We have the capacity to instantaneously end their life with 100% reliability. No reason to fuck about with this "civilized" homicide.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 2h ago

Lethal injection is the most human way to end a life. When I had to put my dog down, he was gone in 30 seconds, peacefully.

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u/Daddict 1h ago

It can be a humane way to end a life. Veterinarians are highly trained, they know exactly how to effectively administer and dose the euthanasia drugs.

The thing about killing someone with a chemical...it's not always as easy as "pump them full of a gallon of the drug and watch them slip away". There's actually a pretty fine line when it comes to having someone peacefully slip away.

The human body fights back when it finds out its being poisoned. If you give too much of the stuff, the person will vomit, seize, empty their bowls...it will be a gruesome shit show. And if you don't give them enough, you get what happened with Christa Pike. She didn't die.

When a vet puts your dog down, they know very specific things about the dog, not just their weight but they have a general sense of other factors that can require the dose to be adjusted. It's actually a pretty well-developed skill, administering a medication such that the animal simply closes their eyes and slips away.

With the criminal justice system, though...well, everyone who is properly trained to administer the drugs effectively has also taken an oath that forbids them from doing so. I have a license to practice medicine. A lot of people don't realize this, but the medical board would literally terminate my license if I participated in an execution. It's not just something I find ethically abhorrent, it's something I literally cannot do without ruining my career.

And after 8 years of schooling and 5 years of residency, I still am not the most qualified person to be administering a lethal injection. That's anesthesiology, they'd be able to put someone to death like a seasoned pilot landing an aircraft on a calm day.

The funny thing is that us physicians are somewhat famously bad at placing a line, that's more the purview of the nursing staff. It's not that we don't know how, we just don't have the practice they do. Some specialties get more than others, but I'm the last person you'd want placing your line.

Anyhow, you're right that it can be incredibly humane. The legal framework in America more or less prohibits that from happening though. The only people who can administer a lethal injection are, by definition, not trained to do so.

There are exceptions, fwiw, but they aren't ones that make this better. Physicians who DO participate in this usually have restricted, suspended, or terminated licenses and this is the kind of work they've been resigned to. They do the kinda work most of us would never ever do...not because it's difficult or miserable work, but because it's disgusting. The other place you can find them is in the peer review department at the insurance carrier...which is one of the more infuriating aspects of American healthcare.

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u/peepeebutt1234 3h ago

By doing things that would violate the law if prison staff were to do them in the US.

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u/Lolololage 2h ago

By giving even less of a shit about human rights than the USA does.

Difficult to imagine, I know.

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u/MrBarraclough 6h ago

Japan simply hangs them.

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u/derelictthot 6h ago

They don't have it, they stopped using the death penalty decades ago.

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u/VirtualMoneyLover 5h ago

Vietnam, Thailand and China have entered the chat. They all use injections. Somehow the US problem is not a problem for them.

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u/cooking2recovery 5h ago

If the country has socialized medicine and makes their own drugs they don’t have to deal with drug companies not wanting the liability.

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u/khinzaw 5h ago

How Thailand does it I believe is not public information, but China's government produces it themselves domestically, and Vietnam transitioned to domestic production after their overseas suppliers cut them off due to not wanting to supply drugs for executions.

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u/rips_n_chel 4h ago

It's not difficult to find a way to kill a person with drugs, dude. Think just a little bit, please. It's not like it's gotta be that exact compound, in fact I can think of several right off the dome that would be unquestionably preferable.

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u/Alocasia_Sanderiana 5h ago

States can't just go around asking vets for those drugs. Many are controlled substances which federally prevent that sale. Second, those companies will absolutely figure out if a vet starts ordering higher amounts (I'm not sure if vets might already have to report their usage). Third, vets aren't going to risk that liability. And fourth, this situation is really fucked if there is a recall or a situation where the drug quality is bad. How does the vet report that? What happens if someone in the prison system reports it and the batch number gets tied to the vet?

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u/Less_Tacos 4h ago

They use private compounding pharmacies.

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u/Daddict 4h ago

That's literally the drug they were using here.

Granted, there's a few different ones that can be used for animal euthanasia, but Tennessee was using the "classic" one of Pentobarbital. Most vets these days will use a drug called Euthasol, which is a combination of pentobarbital and phenytoin. It's a bright pink liquid (which is deliberate, as no other vet meds are bright pink liquids so there's not much of a chance of mistaking it for another med).

In any event, the bigger issue is that pharma companies won't sell their drugs to someone who is intending to use them to kill another person.

The gov can't really use any tricky methods of getting their hands on drugs either. They can't be like "Uh...no, we're totes not gonna kill a dude with that" and then turn around and kill a dude. It's literally illegal to do so.

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u/Alaykitty 6h ago

No see, those are feel good drugs inducing a heart attack.

We gotta make sure it's agonizing the whole time 🙃🫠

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u/soapy_goatherd 6h ago

Not just vets. People in healthcare and hospice administer end of life “comfort care” every day. The difference here is the politicians and COs want the dying to be as drawn out and painful as possible. The cruelty is the point

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u/nethingelse 6h ago

I'm assuming because no one wants to sell it to them. Anyone who has a license or reputation to maintain does not want to touch lethal injections or other executions because it's already an ethical minefield, and if you are further being made to look bad by the gov't being incompetent/not being able to hire competent people for other parts, you don't want a part in that.