Independent inquiry ordered after failed execution of Pike, who was convicted of 1994 murder
Tennessee’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes after receiving a double dose of the lethal drug that should have quickly killed her.
Bill Lee, a Republican, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after Wednesday night’s failed attempt to put to death Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, at the execution chamber in Nashville.
Meanwhile, Pike, 50, remained in the hospital on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care,” Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys, said at an afternoon press conference.
The death penalty is fucking barbaric and the idea that you can come up with a way to humanely kill a person is insane. What kind of psychopath do you have to be to sit down and put to paper an official protocol on how to execute another human being? What kind of psychopath do you have to be to feel you have the right to sentence someone to be executed? And what kind of psychopath do you have to be to partake in carrying out the execution? Psychopaths all around.
They don’t want humane killing, we can do that. They want sanitized killing where the people wanting execution don’t feel gross about it and the people being executed still feel pain, either emotionally or physically but ideally both.
If you wanted to make sure it was done so the inmate feels no pain we can do that. You could drug an inmate with ambien so they go to sleep, then anesthetize them deeper, put them in a gurney and wheel them into a room where their head is blown off by a very large shotgun. This would be foolproof and easy for the prisoner, but would be obviously barbaric.
They want the appearance of being civilized while doing an uncivilized act, so we have this circus instead.