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.
If I was a doctor and I successfully administered a fatal dose of sedative to a patient surely that would be malpractice?
As someone who used to place IVs into neonatal veins, this is fucking atrocious.
Any phlebotomist worth their salt is taught that you NEVER run an IV if it doesn’t flush. That’s literally week one shit!
I disagree with the death penalty in general. But this is just beyond anything I can comprehend. Four separate so called medical specialists just set aside their so called training to torture a woman.
This is deplorable.
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‘Shocked’ would indicate an electric chair is possible
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im sure every cell block had 3 or more people that could find a vein in under a minute
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Abolish the death penalty. The end. The US clings to practice leading to the largest prison population, the way it clings to its gun policy. Neither are working despite giving it decades to prove itself.
To be fair they aren’t really that wrong with their “it’s not the guns” meme. Lots of Swiss have guns. They don’t have the US problems with gun violence. It really isn’t the guns. US citizen are just generally way worse at controlling their anger than other people.
The US has a violence problem. We also have lots of guns.
I love guns. I enjoy shooting them, building them, and collecting them. I’ve got over 50 firearms ranging from a 50-dollar unbranded used 22 to a “I don’t really want to think about how much I’ve spent on this” custom Bergara precision rifle. And of course I have a ton of optics and a few silencers. I also recognize that most of that collection was too easy for me to get, and that if I were unstable or violent I could cause a lot of harm.
I also concede that the pro-2A crowd has a point that registration of firearms is a line they don’t want to cross because it’s a necessary first step towards mass confiscation.
And with the current political climate, I’m glad the government doesn’t know about my guns. If they could look up how many guns I own and that I’m a leftist, how quickly would they label me as an armed enemy of the state?
The guns are a very hard nut to crack, and the political reality is it’s almost impossible to restrict them. There’s millions of pro-gun single-issue voters and almost no pro-gun-control single-issue voters.
So the more realistic approach is to violence, not gun violence. We do that by making society more equitable, providing social services, free healthcare (including mental health), and worker protections. Keep peope from being driven by desperation into crime and provide mental healthcare to those who need it, and we’ll significantly reduce gun violence without doing a thing about guns themselves.
We all agree that crazy people should not have guns. In Switzerland there are established ways to take away the guns of crazy people. We don’t have that. We have 2a which says shall not be abridged meaning that children get nukes. Fuck 2a.
While the 'cause of the problem may not be guns, I don’t think it’s a good idea to give guns to mentally unstable people.
So that leaves us with either just outright banning guns, because americans have proved they aren’t mentally stable enough to handle guns, or requiring monthly checkups with a psychologist to make sure they should still be allowed access to guns. At the expense of the gun owner of course. Wouldn’t want mental healthcare for the masses now, that would be unamerican.
I’m guessing no licensed doctor or nurse or medicine practitioner of any sorts would have wanted to take place in that, so they took whatever muppets they could find?
No need to guess, that’s exactly what happens. No ethical medical professional participates in executions.
Including the drugs that are used. Which reputable pharmaceutical company wants to be associated with producing the drugs for lethal injection?
The drugs stopped being produced in 2011. So what remains has expired at this point.
So even if we consider they have stocks, those meds will not work as intended.
Expired meds can have a lot of differences. Sometimes they are fine for years after expiration. Sometimes they become less effective. Sometimes they have wildly different effects and interactions and the medication breaks down.
Unless you actually know the shelf life of pentobarbital, that argument isn’t even worth making.
All drugs are required to have an expiration date. Drug companies will only go so far out on that time period in order to cover their asses. Plus, it’s bad for business if you’re selling meds put people could still safely use them 20 years later and don’t need to buy fresh stock. Pentobarbital could start losing potency in 5 years, or it could be shelf stable for 100.
Regardless, this wasn’t the drugs fault. A flipping 24 gauge needle. Oof. I’m just an EMT and I know that’s way too stupidly small. Not to mention all the other signs.
This is absolutely true, but i would challenge the assertion about making people throw away good meds being bad for business.
The law passed in 1979 requiring manufacturers to provide an expiration date of when they could guarantee a drug was still safe and fully effective did not require that the manufacturers do any long term tests, to establish accurate dates though. Many companies slapped a one year date on the labels and called it a day.
They could guarantee a year with then current testing protocols and if people had to toss their perfectly good meds and buy more, then that would just be good for company profits.
The US military keeps huge stockpiles of medicines on hand. Faced with throwing away millions of dollars of meds every year they commissioned a study.
With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.
Pharmaceutical companies were happy to tellpeople throw away medicines years before they needed to.
I think your only agreeing with me.
Unless you actually no the shelf life of pentobarbital, that argument isn’t even worth making.
John Criscio, president of Absolute Standards, said the company ceased producing pentobarbital in December 2020.
Absolute Standards, says it needs to be refrigerated and has a shelf life of 2 1/2 years.
As I’ve started above, that doesn’t necessarily mean it starts going bad after 30 months.
Expired pentobarbital likely played a role in the failed execution. Assuming they kept the vials in perfect, dark storage and it’s formulated with stabilizers, it could last a long time, many years, but if any of those perfect conditions for pharmaceutical storage aren’t met, that time drops to a couple years max. I highly doubt prisons have ideal storage for their lethal injection medication, especially because no ethical medical professional will be involved.
Did you even read the article? They blew out her veins and never administered it into her blood stream. Her stating that her arm felt like it was on fire and that the administors were having a hard time pushing saline is proof to the fact. It’s not designed to kill you if it isn’t injected into the blood stream. The old stock 100% had nothing to do with it.
Ideally yes, but
- I know too many medical practitioners that refused to mask up during covid
- I know of workers in medical and social careers that chose it because they want power over other people
- There’s, unsurprisingly, a significant overlap between the above two groups
I wouldn’t put it past some of them to volunteer for a job like this because they get a chubby from causing suffering to patients.
My sons gf is in nursing school right now and she and I were talking about the people in her cohort who are anti vax and the overlap with the overt religious right and virtue signaling and “care culture” there’s absolutely a whole group of people within medicine exactly as you described who have values completely at odds with the hippocratic oath
My wife’s residency director is anti vax. This is a person in charge of teaching new doctors. She’s also a super Christian originally from Idaho.
Absolutely disgusting.
there is a strange relationship between nursing and right wing christians, something about thier only JOB for these people.
Nurses i can see that, because places are so short for nurses, they sometime let certain types of nurses thoguh the cracks.
There are doctors who take their Hypocritic Oath more seriously than their Hippocratic Oath
Your average phlebotomist will be far better than most doctors and nurses at putting in a line
They easily could have found a phlebotomist who needed the extra money. This is simply incompetence. Unbelievable levels of it
They easily could have found a phlebotomist who needed the extra money.
Is it actually all that easy to find medical professionals who don’t have qualms about killing people as a side gig from their day job of healing people?
they dont, they have some janky "medical staff’ to do it. likely not even taken a phelbotomy course. nurses and doctors arnt going to risk thier LICENSE and reputation, they can make more money in private pratices without the potential to get blackballed.
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
Abolish the death penalty. Anyone who has been in county lock up knows we need prisons.
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.
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.
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)
Prisons need to be restructured for the purposes of rehabilitation
Gonna need a source for that
30 years, even. Most of her life.
pent 20 years
30 years, even
LOL sure let’s just let a teen murderer wander around, Should have been zapped the moment guilt was proven.
Moron.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t care, the government shouldn’t be in the business of executions. You can always, to a lesser or greater extent, make things right with unlawful detention and charging an innocent person. You can’t un-kill a person if you get things wrong.
maybe so. but a gov should not be the one to do it.
Are you suggesting it be a private company or what?
no. only suggesting it not be a state.
Or the church? 🤣
I feel like we will find malice was the motivator.
What other motivator could there ever be in a death sentence?
In theory that should be carried out like euthanasia. Imagine someone putting down your dog and they cause all kinds of suffering because they like causing it and the animal is gonna be dead either way. It wouldn’t be acceptable either.
How is that anything other than vengeance?
You can put a person in prison for life to stop them from ever killing again.
There aren’t prisons for dogs killing, but there could be.
I’m not arguing pro death penalty. I’m actually hardline against it. I agree with your statement absolutely. Just stating that the malice part comes from the unnecessary cruelty, intended or not. In theory the protocol was designed to be painless and clinical, but they keep botching it but also keep doing it, which is in fact malicious even when applying Hanlons razor.
Can’t even provide enough funding for legalized murder while we still have a barbaric death penalty.
And keep in mind, the team struggled so much because they have to find medical staff who are willing to murder someone, to cause harm, because that violates the Hippocratic oath they all take. So most of the time the medical staff aren’t qualified individuals, it’s whoever will accept the meager pay to murder someone for the state.
Phlebotomists don’t take oaths but they didn’t even know to look for one willing to do it.
phlebs do require certifications/license, they dont want to get that revoked too.also phlebs are wanted in alot of medical professions, so they arnt exactly large number of them jobless because it requires no college classes like most “Techs”.
I fear they’re more likely to give it to the sick sycophants who salivate at the mouth at the thought of legal murder
most of the people doing executions arent even trained medical professionals, probably just someone they can convince to do the “injections here or here”
Nurses and docs can make bank doing private practices, no need to risk thier careers and license.
i expect nothing less from that “state you fly through to get to florida”
That was blatantly obvious from the start. You need iv access, you find people with iv skills. This person did not have those skills and plowed ahead anyway like a sociopath.
I’m super against the death penalty for crimes cause the state has been proven to murder innocents. But I also gave plasma in college for weed money, and those phlebotomists are barely high school graduates. How could they have found someone so incredibly inept‽
I’m not the easiest stick, and there are many so-called phlebotomists that use me as a human pin cushion. Then there are others that can hit my vein on the first stick. It’s about 50/50 what experience I will have.
Yeah, I’ve never had a problem so relying on my own experience probably isn’t the best basis for statistical analysis.
Why the hell don’t we just swap their air supply with nitrogen? No medical knowledge needed, no pharmacy needed. Considering the number of engineers in the defense industry they don’t exactly have a Hippocratic oath. Most of air is nitrogen so your body doesn’t fight it. You just feel stupid and loopy and high like losing cabin pressure in a airplane. CO2 or Helium would work as well.
Why dont you just stop behaving like barbarians and give an end to this practice?
Orphan crushing machine moment.
Just abolish the death penalty.
CO2 makes you panic, that would be horrific.
Exactly what I was thinking! Helium, yes. They actually use it for unlicensed euthanasia.
We have a shortage of helium. Again though, just ban the death penalty. No matter how badly you think someone deserves it, the potential to execute an innocent person should override that. Especially with how our legal system is manipulated.
nitrogen would also be inhuman, because gas is associated with the gas chambers.
They botch that too. The few times they’ve done it the prisoner ends up suffocating to death because they don’t vacate the CO2
Abolish the death penalty
Nitrogen is preferred. Your body can detect elevated CO2 levels and make you start to gasp breath. Helium would make the person’s voice go squeaky. I don’t think anyone involved wants the condemned shouting in a Mickey Mouse voice before they die.
Sometime, as a little treat for yourself, see if you can huff the whiff of nearly pure CO² gasthat forms in the neck of a coke bottle when it is first opened.
That little whisp of vapor.
It’s neat to see how carbon dioxide feels to breathe.
CO2, absolutely no! Elevated carbonic acid in your blood causes a very visceral reaction.
We think this would humane, but we dont actually know is my understanding.
Not that this was humane either.
Edit: i think you meant CO, not CO2.
Yes you are right, I was thinking of carbon monoxide not dioxide as yourself and others pointed out.
