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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Absolute insanity.
We need to end the barbaric practice of capital punishment.
But important detail:
I live in one of the “formally suspended” states (Oregon). Capital punishment is entrenched in the state constitution, but state officials have done their darn best to get around that. The governor commutes all death sentences to life imprisonment. The execution chamber and death row were both dismantled, and the state has no way to procure the drugs needed for lethal injection, the only approved method of execution. A “temporary” moratorium has been in effect for over a decade.
There hasn’t been an execution in Oregon in almost 30 years.
The federal government and military really ought to swap positions there. I’m opposed to the death penalty in general, but we’ve got a lot of soldiers who commit war crimes and need punished for it
Where I live, the death penalty in the Philippines is abolished for almost three decades, yet some people I met – especially middle- and lower-class people – insist on having it and corporal punishment reinstated, believing society would be supposedly much safer like Saudi Arabia (which does carry out forced amputation and beheading, but still is not really an effective deterrent), but ignoring completely that their everyday problems such as petty thievery are ultimately caused by class struggle and unequal distribution of wealth and resources.
That although there were no execution of prisoners during the Duterte regime, nonetheless thousands have been executed for minor drug-related offenses with not even seeing a courtroom, by either hired gunmen or by law-enforcement officials in disguise.
This is some fucked up morbid shit.
I unironically believe we should bring back firing squads, if we’re keeping executions at all.
Lethal injection is so fickle and extremely painful/terrifying for the victim (look to doctor reports on the three drugs used – youre basically paralyzed but in constant agony the whole time, but because youre paralyzed it looks really peaceful)
Can you imagine, getting executed and then waking up in a hospital days later.
Yeah, there’ll eventually be a Silent Hill that starts just like this.
In a normal society this horrific sequence of events would be cause to reexamine what was done and determine if it’s appropriate for the state to continue murdering its citizens.
I mean, at least part of the problem is that nobody want to provide drugs to kill people. Most of the country moved way past executions a good long while ago.
They’ve got a shit govorner that must have gotten bored waging war on the state’s only African American majority city and decided to kill a woman to make himself feel better.
Please tell me I’m not the only one with these scenes running through my head.
But seriously. This is no anomaly. This may be a more stark example than most, but it’s part of a running pattern of botched executions. What more do people have to see to be swayed that capital punishment is barbaric and should be abolished?
They tried to execute her twice and within a week she’s already doing more than Mitch McConnell has done since he’s ‘returned’ to the Senate
So… Is this like a movie scenario where she gets to go free?
I mean death penalty opinions aside, does it make sense to give medical care to someone you’re trying to kill? What a weird world we live in.
it’s the doctors’ duty to keep her alive. They took the Hippocratic oath. It’s the state that is trying to kill her, not the doctors
But it was the state that brought her to the doctors.
We, as a society, are trying to kill her, not torture her. The constitution explicitly bans torture
It’s a fine line between execution and torture
Ok but as a society, we’ve gotten pretty good at killing people. Lots of different ways. Suddenly we’re like, “Oh no. This is really hard.” It’s like the one thing we excel at.
She committed a heinous crime but after surviving TWO executions, doesn’t this count as double jeopardy already?
Double Jeopardy is when you are charged for the same crime more than once. Like if you got a not-guilty verdict, so they charged you again for another go at a guilty verdict.
This is not an example of double jeopardy, it is an example of torture, in clear violation of the Constitution.
You are sorta right though. Her sentence should be commuted for being subjected to torture.
Yeah I know what double jeopardy is. She’s been tortured and probably should have her sentence reduced to life imprisonment.
She only survived one execution attempt - they administered two doses of the drug, but that doesn’t make it two executions.
As chewypoops explained, this has nothing to do with double jeopardy.
This is so weird… I wonder if she woke up wondering if this is real since I feel like it would make no sense to her. Also that part about her being a survivor, come on really? I feel bad for how her childhood was, and that the other 2 got less of a sentance than her, but do I feel sorry for her or think of her as a victim? Nah not really. From what I read she will most likely get electicution, but there will be years of more fighting now and my guess is she just gets life since I think she will die naturally in jail before that next attempt ever happens.
If anything I feel bad for the family of the actual victim who sees all this and also see people showing Pike more sympathy over it. Meanwhile I remember hearing of 2 cases in the last year that were executions for innocent people that were not allowed to be reversed and ended up dying, those are the ones I really feel sorry for.
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.
If it were me I think it would drive me insane. Just constant doubt about whether I’m dead or not. Or perhaps jumped universes.
She say anything?
Ouch
