New details of IV team’s attempts to find a vein shared by Pike’s lawyer ‘shocked and disturbed’ practitioners

Medical experts have expressed shock at the apparent incompetence shown by Tennessee’s execution team during the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike, the prisoner who survived a normally fatal dose of pentobarbital, which they say would be considered medical malpractice in any other setting.

New details emerged on Thursday of how Tennessee’s intravenous (IV) team struggled for almost an hour to set up a line into Pike’s arms through which she would be administered the fatal dose of sedative. A blow-by-blow account was released in legal proceedings from Pike’s lawyer, Randy Spivey, who was present inside the death chamber at her 30 September failed execution.

The technical procedures attempted by the four unidentified members of the IV team as they tried to find a vein, as described by Spivey, provoked alarm among medical experts. They said the standards applied appeared to fall glaringly short of anything that would be deemed acceptable in a medical environment.

  • Dearth@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    This woman committed a crime as a teenager then spent 20 years in prison waiting to be murdered by the state. How barbaric. Abolish prisons

      • KeithD@lemmy.nz
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        5 days ago

        Abolish private prisons. Because there shouldn’t be a profit motive involved in housing inmates.

        And yes, abolish the death penalty. Because the state can’t be trusted to get it right, and it’s cheaper to just lock people up for the rest of their lives if necessary.

        • Soggy@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Most prisons aren’t private. The important “but” is that they still contract a ton of processes out to private businesses, yet another way to turn tax dollars into political favors.

    • ° 。Juniper 。°@piefed.zip
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      5 days ago

      I am not for the death penalty in any capacity. However, this woman kept trying to murder people while in prison, although in far less horrific and dramatic ways than she murdered Colleen. I imagine the isolation she experienced on death row had an effect on the murder attempt? She needed to be in a psychiatric hospital

      (I thought I had read elsewhere that she had two murder attempts on fellow inmates, one involving a romantic partner, but Wikipedia only has one attempt so I’ll leave it at that)

    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      LOL sure let’s just let a teen murderer wander around, Should have been zapped the moment guilt was proven.

      Moron.

      • kofe@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Hey dipshit no one said let murderers wander around. Should check out this thing called critical thinking and couple it with empathy so we can get out of biblical ages eye for an eye bullshit.

        • KeithD@lemmy.nz
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          5 days ago

          Eye for an eye isn’t bullshit. It’s saying to always make sure the punishment is proportional to the crime. Before that you’d get people being punished much more harshly than their crime could possibly justify. We still do, of course, but we used to as well.

    • redditmodssucks@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Should have been put to death right after the sentence. Read up on what she did she’s a fucking monster and deserves to die.