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submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world 118 points 6 days ago

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?

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 88 points 6 days ago

No need to guess, that's exactly what happens. No ethical medical professional participates in executions.

[-] ergonomic_importer@piefed.ca 35 points 6 days ago

Including the drugs that are used. Which reputable pharmaceutical company wants to be associated with producing the drugs for lethal injection?

[-] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 17 points 6 days ago

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.

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[-] lemmyng@piefed.ca 36 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 38 points 6 days ago

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

[-] TheGoldenV@lemmy.world 34 points 6 days ago

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.

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[-] dhork@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago

There are doctors who take their Hypocritic Oath more seriously than their Hippocratic Oath

[-] Taldan@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago

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

[-] gigaqps@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

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?

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[-] MrSulu@lemmy.ml 48 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

The US has a violence problem.

The US has an emotional wellbeing and emotional maturity problem.

[-] MBech@feddit.dk 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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 free mental healthcare for the masses now, that would be unamerican.

[-] bloviate@lemmus.org 3 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] Dearth@lemmy.world 31 points 6 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

[-] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 35 points 6 days ago

Abolish the death penalty. Anyone who has been in county lock up knows we need prisons.

[-] KeithD 18 points 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 6 points 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 10 points 6 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)

[-] kofe@lemmy.world 17 points 5 days ago

Prisons need to be restructured for the purposes of rehabilitation

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[-] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 7 points 6 days ago

30 years, even. Most of her life.

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[-] crystalmathadept@lemmy.zip 39 points 6 days ago

I feel like we will find malice was the motivator.

[-] eurodyne@piefed.world 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

What other motivator could there ever be in a death sentence?

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[-] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago
  1. 'Shocked' would indicate an electric chair is possible

  2. im sure every cell block had 3 or more people that could find a vein in under a minute

[-] godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 18 points 6 days ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjawA93_jAs

[-] CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.social 8 points 6 days ago

Phlebotomists don't take oaths but they didn't even know to look for one willing to do it.

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[-] IamMoonPie@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] bold_atlas@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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.

[-] frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io 10 points 6 days ago

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.

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[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 6 points 5 days ago

i expect nothing less from that "state you fly through to get to florida"

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 4 days ago

If I was a doctor and I successfully administered a fatal dose of sedative to a patient surely that would be malpractice?

[-] Unlearned9545@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] Siegfried@lemmy.world 27 points 6 days ago

Why dont you just stop behaving like barbarians and give an end to this practice?

[-] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 19 points 6 days ago

CO2 makes you panic, that would be horrific.

[-] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 4 points 6 days ago

Exactly what I was thinking! Helium, yes. They actually use it for unlicensed euthanasia.

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[-] Witchfire@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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

[-] mercano@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago

Orphan crushing machine moment.

Just abolish the death penalty.

[-] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

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[-] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 4 points 6 days ago

CO2, absolutely no! Elevated carbonic acid in your blood causes a very visceral reaction.

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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2026
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