Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
Ms. Pike continues to receive critical medical care at a Nashville hospital, the lawyers said. The prognosis remains unclear, they said, but they expect a long recovery.
“Christa is a survivor and will take recovery one day at a time,” the lawyers said.
Ms. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug. She has been hospitalized since the execution attempt on Sept. 30, after it became clear to witnesses that she was still breathing after two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in lethal injection executions.
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If I remember correctly, she said she has a condition which would probably make the lethal injection drugs ineffective. And she told them that.
The drug protocol was a massive single dose of pentobarbital, which is a barbiturate. Followed by a second backup dose of the same size if required.
This is a different and simpler protocol than the 3 drug combo of, like, midazolam, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. The barbiturates work solely off of sedative-like effects, and lethality is achieved by using a massive overdose.
This is what I’ve pieced together from news and court filings:
This drug works well if it gets into the blood stream. If it goes into the muscles and other parts of the body besides the veins, it doesn’t have its psychoactive sedative effects. The drug is very basic, as in high pH, so it causes burns.
Injecting not into vein also causes pain and swelling simply from mechanically forcing a largish volume of liquid into the body where there’s not a lot of free space to accept it.
So the story seems to be that the execution people struggled for a long time to get a good needle stick into a vein. The victim had prewarned them and the court that she has tiny veins, like a lot of people. It seems like they possibly gave up on the vein and just dumped two whole vials into what was effectively an intramuscular injection.
There was a witness report that one of the multiple needles that were removed from her arm was bent at a 90 degree angle.
Not the drugs, just getting IV placement. Which is common. You start taking about getting something like an intraosseous or a central line placed you well out of the expertise they staff those morons for and well into cruel and unusual punishment territory. Of course their lack of ability to place a PIV in so many of these cases already proved that. These idiots actually tried to continue the execution without a patent PIV line, just infiltrating alkaline and tissue toxic drugs into her arm with the associated local damage and hoping enough of the dose would get there in some sort of reasonable time frame. The only execution method unlikely to be botched remains the guillotine.
A long drop hanging with a good rope is pretty idiot-proof. If you don’t have well-trained executioners, you’ll rip a few heads off, or have a few people die from cerebral oedema instead of fracturing the neck, but they’re still dead within minutes at worst.
Filling a chamber with nitrogen works well - nobody has yet managed to live without oxygen.
The guillotine (when properly maintained and well built) works very reliably. You just need not to be too squeamish about blood.
A firing squad is pretty effective.
But Americans just have to invent new ways to kill people in ways that they think will be less gruesome.
Executions are not quiet, peaceful things, and attempts to make them so are misguided.
To paraphrase John Oliver, there are better and worse positions to fuck your mother, but at the end of the day, you’re still a motherfucker.
Executions don’t save much money, when you consider the expense of building, maintaining, and operating the machinery of death. They are not an effective deterrent to crime (this is counter-intuitive: people don’t think it be like it is, but it do.) They are irreversible, and courts have repeatedly sentenced innocent people to death.
Just abolish the death penalty. I’m happy that I live in a country that doesn’t do it anymore.