The Tennessee execution team tasked with setting an intravenous line in the arms of the death row prisoner Christa Pike through which she could be injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital repeatedly warned that her vein might be “blowing”, before they went ahead with the procedure, her lawyer has revealed. Members of the intravenous (IV) team used up to 10 needles as they sought to establish a line through which Pike could be killed with a massive dose of the sedative. About 20 minutes into the attempt, they began discussing among themselves whether the prisoner’s vein “might be blowing”.
Two unidentified members of the team began poking the site through which they were trying to set up the line, and both agreed that they couldn’t tell whether they had succeeded in finding the vein. The potentially critical new details of how Tennessee’s execution team failed to kill Pike, 50, on 30 September are contained in the most detailed account yet given by Pike’s lawyer Randy Spivey. In a declaration that was released as part of separate legal proceedings, Spivey gave a minute-by-minute chronology of Pike’s ordeal, which he personally witnessed in the death chamber.
The account suggests that the IV team was racked by doubts even before the pentobarbital began to flow, as they struggled to find a vein for almost an hour. The search began at 6.35pm that evening, and was completed at 7.24pm, at which point the team left the chamber assuming everything was going according to plan. But Pike remained alive, making snoring and choking sounds.
The execution was eventually called off, and after 10 days in hospital Pike was returned to prison in Nashville. She is the only prisoner in modern times to survive a full dose of a lethal injection drug. Though she can now talk and walk, her long-term prognosis is still unknown.
The gruesome events of her failed execution have prompted nationwide soul-searching about the death penalty in the US, and forced the Republican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, to call off all executions in the state pending a review. Spivey’s blow-by-blow chronology gives agonizing new details about the lengths to which the IV team went to find a vein, as well as their profound anxieties about whether they were doing the right thing. A person on the IV team named by Spivey as “member two” first expressed the fear that Pike’s vein might be blown at 6.53pm.
The team then discarded the 20-gauge needle that they had been using, saying: ‘“It’s not long enough. What is the longest you’ve got?” Three minutes later, at 6.57pm, member two repeated it “might be blowing”. Spivey reported: “Member two and IV team member 3 inspected the insertion site and poked it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
