On Wednesday night, Christa Pike lay strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville while the State of Tennessee injected pentobarbital into her veins. When the first dose did not kill her, the execution team gave her a second. More than an hour after the procedure began, an ambulance was called. She was severely injured, but still alive. By Thursday, Ms. Pike was in critical condition, receiving what her lawyers called lifesaving care.
I am an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. I have studied pulmonary complications and respiratory distress caused by lethal injection, and I know of no other case in which a person was given lethal injection drugs and then carried from the execution chamber to a hospital bed. Ms. Pike’s lawyers retained me as a medical expert. I reviewed her medical records and warned her team that she had medical conditions that could lead to a painful and cruel death.
Tennessee has not explained what went wrong. Ms. Pike has small veins, making IV insertion difficult. After the pentobarbital was administered, her arms turned purple, with blistering and burning at injection sites. This suggests the drug entered tissue rather than bloodstream. Gov. Bill Lee has said the Department of Correction followed protocol exactly. That is the problem.
Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features. Pentobarbital is highly alkaline, like bleach, and causes severe chemical burns when injected into tissue. In Ms. Pike’s case, enough drug reached her brain to sedate her deeply, but not enough to stop her breathing. This is a state whose own review found that none of the drugs prepared for executions between 2018 and 2022 had been fully tested.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing