Recently, Tennessee experienced the botched execution of Christa Pike, who was convicted with a death sentence for the murder of a fellow classmate in 1995. It was the second of two botched executions by lethal injection that Tennessee oversaw this year alone, raising many questions. What caused these failures, who is responsible for them, and what is to prevent them from happening again? This public issue has become the center of attention for some Americans, prompting many to criticize this form of punishment.
Brief Overview of The Death Sentence
Capital offenses, such as murder, treason, and genocide, merit a death sentence. The jury decides on imposing the death penalty on a defendant. In some states, the defendant is allowed to choose their form of execution, but lethal injection is usually the primary or default method.
What The Lethal Injection Is
The lethal injection is either a dose of a specific drug that stops the heart or a fatal overdose of an anesthetic or sedative. Pentobarbital, the execution drug administered to Christa Pike, if used through prescription, slows down the activity of the brain and central nervous system. At a high dosage, it would shut down the central nervous system and stop the brain’s signaling to the body to conduct all the life-sustaining functions.
Lethal injections were introduced in the 1970s in the United States as a more-humane alternative to the electric chair and other execution methods. Before then, the executions by electric chair left some condemned inmates, such as William Kemmler (the first person subject to this form of execution), alive and in grotesque states of dishevel until the final stroke of death. Now, lethal injection has supplanted the electric chair to become the most common execution method in the United States, according to DeathPenaltyInfo.
Yet, like the electric chair, lethal injections aren’t foolproof.
Common Complications
Before the execution takes place, the state needs to obtain lethal injection drugs. Unfortunately, many pharmaceutical companies have imposed measures to stop their drugs’ use in executions, citing moral concerns and conflictions with the drugs’ intended purpose to aid people’s quality of life. These prohibitions leave a paucity of FDA-approved drugs in the market for execution purposes, and states have begun relying on compounding pharmacies to produce unregistered lethal injection drug substitutions. In fact, the FDA does not approve the products of compounding pharmacies. With the unauthorized drug acquisitions, the drug quality might not meet the standards, which can cause numerous problems in regard to legal executions. For example, the 2015 Oklahoma execution of Charles Warner used potassium acetate instead of potassium chloride (which stops the heart) after a private compounding company ordered the wrong drug. Due to this mix-up, Warner suffered an agonizing death, reporting that his “body [was] on fire.”
Not only does the state face struggles obtaining the proper drugs to carry out the death sentence, but medical complications can arise during the execution as well. In the case of Christa Pike, a preexisting medical condition of small, fragile veins made the IV line extremely difficult to place. It caused the prison medical staff multiple tries until they finally established the line with a bent needle. Secondly, some cases involve problems arising from insufficient administrations of sedations to the condemned inmate. One instance of this mishap occurred during Clayton Lockett’s execution in 2014. The Oklahoma prison couldn’t legally acquire standard execution sedatives and, instead, decided on utilizing midazolam, which was not reliable to hold a deep, sedated state like a surgical anesthetic. Because he was not properly sedated, Lockett remained partially conscious, groaning and writhing in agony on the gurney after the administration of the second and third drugs that were supposed to paralyze the muscles and stop the heart respectively. In addition, both of these cases involved an IV line infiltration, or the catheter punctured or slipped out of the vein, causing the injections to pump into the surrounding tissue.
Who Administers The Injection?
While it might seem obvious that a professional doctor or a medically trained staff member would probably be the one to administer the lethal injection to the condemned inmate, it is not true in most cases. Many health organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association, forbid their members from actively participating in executions. Without professional medical staff, a planned execution can easily derail. Take Tony Carruther’s failed 2026 execution in Tennessee. It was halted after the prison staff and a backup medical profession lacking recent clinical experience with central intravenous access both failed to secure an IV line.
Ethical and Legal Concerns
When doctors graduate, they take an oath (similar to the Hippocratic Oath written in ancient Greece by Greek physician Hippocrates) pledging to be healers. In the context of medical intervention during criminal executions, many doctors view it as a direct contrast to the ideals that they swore to uphold. If a medical professional promises to abide by medical tenets in order to ensure proper patient treatment and then acts in a manner that purposefully causes damage or death to a patient, the sworn oath holds no weight. It would betray the patient’s faith in the healthcare system to provide him or her beneficial treatment and care. In the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics, members are in a profession “dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so,” therefore engaging in “legally authorized execution” is contradictory.
Branching off of the numerous complications resulting from the lethal injection, critics are emphasizing the provisions of the eighth amendment: the prohibition on federal and state governments from imposing cruel and unusual punishments. Pike, Warner, Lockett, and some other condemned inmates punished with the lethal injection all faced excruciating pain and complications while the justice system meted out the executions. The eighth amendment directly condemns this issue, therefore critics see these executions as unconstitutional.
Specific to Christa Pike’s execution, Pike survived the first execution attempt and might either be rescheduled for another execution or sentenced to life in prison without parole. If Pike is scheduled for execution, the fifth amendment could possibly come into play. The fifth amendment protects people from double jeopardy, or being punished twice for the same offense. Pike’s lawyers have suggested that her case could fall under double jeopardy because she would be sentenced to death again for the 1995 murder.
However, the Supreme Court ruled that a failed execution doesn’t constitute double jeopardy in 1947 after an electric chair malfunction, a ruling that Christa Pike’s legal team will consider at their next court status meeting tomorrow, October 23rd. Her attorneys report that she is alert, conscious, and speaking almost four weeks after her failed execution last month.
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