The lone woman on Tennessee’s death row was still alive after she was administered two lethal injections, her lawyer said in a motion seeking to halt her execution Wednesday night, a stunning development after the Supreme Court had stepped in to allow the state to put her to death.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said “executioners had injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals” and Christa Pike was “still alive and snoring,” her lawyers said in a federal court filing.
They said Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat” and that curtains to the death chamber “have gone down twice.”
Im assuming you’re not just being a smart ass, and will give you a real answer:
The human body can be extremely resilient. If you are required to kill someone but not allowed to intentionally prolong the death or inflict unnecessary suffering, you must be really precise. The law is written that way to prevert torturing someone before their death.
In this botched execution, witnesses said her arm was purple and there were 7 sites that needles were used. Imagine attempting to injected a substance into someone’s bloodstream 7 times and failing each time. All those liquids have to go somewhere, so it just absolutely ruins everything it touches loose in the body. She complained that her arm felt like it was going to burst. That to me is unnecessary suffering.
If they really wanted to kill someone nearly instantly they would have some type of blast chamber and use enough explosive that someone would basically be exploded in fractions of a second. But somehow that seems messy and barbaric compared to torturing someone like the state did last night.
Curious if those 7 sites were IV attempts or actual injections.
I believe I heard before that part of the problem with lethal injection is getting the IV started. Medical personnel follow this little creed called “Primum Non Nocere” aka first, do no harm, so they very rightfully won’t have anything to do with lethal injection. Apparently the people who start the IVs for lethal injection are just whoever they can get to volunteer to start an IV. Starting an IV isn’t rocket science, but there are things you need to know, and if it’s not in the vein correctly and that isn’t recognized it could result in the injection not actually going into the vein and just ending up in her arm to slowly be absorbed by the surrounding tissue, which is something that theoretically could have her getting a lower dose over a longer amount of time instead of the entire dose all at once.