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.
They should be blacklisted from even cleaning a dentist office’s toilet. Being anywhere near an execution should be equivalent of having patient SA on their record.
Medical experts shocked by Tennessee team’s ‘malpractice’ in Christa Pike’s failed execution team . . .
Were you, though? Were you really?
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.
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.
The US has a violence problem.
The US has an emotional wellbeing and emotional maturity problem.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Orphan crushing machine moment.
Just abolish the death penalty.
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
Why dont you just stop behaving like barbarians and give an end to this practice?
CO2 makes you panic, that would be horrific.
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.
