Death Penalty News

Tennessee says it followed its protocol when Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital. The failure lies in a method that needs medical skill that doctors are ethically barred from providing. Editor’s note: Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and medical ethicist, has served as a medical expert for Christa Pike’s legal team, including providing expert testimony in her challenge to Tennessee’s execution protocol before the Sept. 30 execution attempt.

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.

Over the course of two hours, witnesses watched and listened as Christa Pike cried, whimpered and snored through Tennessee’s attempt to execute her. By the end of it, executioners had given her two doses of the state’s lethal injection drugs. Her arms were swollen and blistered, and one had turned purple, her attorneys said. And she was still alive, marking what legal experts say is the first time a prisoner in the U.S. has survived one dose—let alone two—of lethal injection drugs.

Convicted murderer Christa Pike has woken up and begun speaking from her hospital bed almost a week after authorities in the US state of Tennessee botched her execution, her lawyers said. Pike, 50, was sent to hospital after surviving two attempts to execute her via lethal injection for the 1995 murder of a 19-year-old she met at a summer camp for troubled teens. An independent review of what went wrong in the Nashville execution chamber on 30 September has been ordered by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. He has also halted executions in the state for the rest of the year.

Dr. Zivot is an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. He consulted on Christa Pike’s case before her attempted execution.   On Wednesday night, Christa Pike lay strapped to a gurney at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville while the State of Tennessee injected pentobarbital, a sedative that is lethal in high doses, into her veins. When the 1st dose did not kill her, the execution team gave her a 2nd. At one point, she told the room her arm felt as if it were about to burst. She was nearly correct. More than an hour after the procedure began, an ambulance was called. She was severely injured but still alive. 

Indiana prison officials plan to proceed with Jeffrey Weisheit’s Nov. 5 execution after a botched lethal injection in Tennessee prompted that state’s governor to halt executions and order an independent review. The Indiana Department of Correction said Thursday that it remains confident in its procedures despite using the same protocol as Tennessee. Agency officials offered no additional details about the training of those administering lethal injections, the role of medical personnel, or safeguards for execution drugs.

Tennessee unable to carry out the execution by lethal injection of Christa Gail Pike Tennessee officials were unable to put Christa Gail Pike to death for a 1995 murder Wednesday, media witnesses said, after the lethal injection was halted for hours as courts considered a last-minute appeal of what would have been the state's 1st execution of a woman in at least 200 years.  Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution for a killing she committed at age 18 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling that stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start. Officials then attempted to go ahead with it as planned. 

A physician uses a cartoon lawsuit to question the burdens US execution law places on condemned prisoners. As a physician, I have spent a career on the far side of a fact pattern I did not choose. This is the moment when something prescribed or administered goes wrong inside a body that trusted it not to. I have seen that more than once. It would be more comfortable to cast myself as the one who gets hurt. It is more honest to say I am the supplier. The drug, the dose, the device, and the airway all enter the body through me. In the cartoon, I am not the coyote. I am Acme.

MONTGOMERY, Ala.  — The execution of Anthony Boyd by nitrogen gas in Alabama on Thursday marked the longest use of the untested method in U.S. history, stretching nearly 40 minutes amid convulsions, labored breathing and witness accounts of prolonged agony.  At 37 minutes from the start of the procedure until death was declared, Boyd's final moments have reignited fierce debates over whether the oxygen-deprivation technique — touted by states as a painless alternative to lethal injection — constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The author, a medical ethicist and practicing physician, argues that when executions fail to cause death within five minutes, the Constitution requires immediate medical resuscitation—even if it means saving the life of a condemned prisoner... “It’s hurting so bad,” Byron Black said five minutes after the State of Tennessee initiated his execution last month. The 69-year-old’s anguished words echoed through the death chamber as a device designed to save lives may have prolonged his dying, creating the very cruelty the Constitution forbids.

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT The practice of execution has been around since the days of ancient civilisations, and, as uncomfortable as it may be to think about, this punishment is still handed out in various countries around the world today. Capital punishment for murder was suspended in the UK as recently as 1965, within living memory.  Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans became the last prisoners to be executed on British soil on August 13, 1964, with the pair hanged at separate prisons in Manchester and Liverpool for the murder of John Alan West. Since then, there have been frequent calls to bring back the death penalty, which some supporters believe to be an effective deterrent against the most despicable crimes. Those on the other side of the debate believe capital punishment to be an inhumane measure, often citing the numerous instances where convicts have faced agonising deaths.

An autopsy report for a South Carolina man executed with the state’s lethal injection protocol raises more questions about whether the process is an unusually cruel and painful method of execution. Marion Bowman Jr. was executed on Jan. 31. The Dorchester County native, who was convicted of shooting and killing 21-year-old Kandee Martin in 2001, chose to die by lethal injection, which in South Carolina is carried out by a single drug, pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.  

(NEW YORK) — Alabama is set to perform the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday. Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis. Miller was to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri’s execution protocol allows for “surgery without anesthesia” if the typical process of finding a suitable vein to inject the lethal drug doesn’t work, lawyers for a death row inmate say in an appeal aimed at sparing his life. Brian Dorsey, 52, is scheduled for execution Tuesday for killing his cousin and her husband at their central Missouri home in 2006. His attorneys are seeking clemency from Gov. Mike Parson and have several appeals pending.

After it intersected with his job as an anesthesiologist, Dr. Joel Zivot devoted years to studying the death penalty. Now, he's concerned about a new form of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, which was used in Alabama for the first time in January. Dr. Joel Zivot first began researching the death penalty 12 years ago when it suddenly affected his day job. As an anesthesiologist in the ICU at Emory University Hospital, Zivot frequently used the drug sodium thiopental. But in 2011, the drug disappeared from the market and caused a drastic shortage in ICUs across the country. When Zivot looked into the cause of the shortage, he found the drug was pulled by manufacturer Hospira after they couldn’t promise the European Union—who threatened to ban the export of lethal injection drugs—that sodium thiopental wasn’t used for executions. “I felt outraged that this drug I used to heal could also be involved in [lethal injection],” says Zivot.

Experts from the United Nations have called on the United States to halt what would be the nation’s first execution by nitrogen gas, warning that it could cause severe suffering and possibly be considered torture. The state of Alabama plans to put Kenneth Eugene Smith to death on January 25 using nitrogen hypoxia, or asphyxiation, by depriving the condemned prisoner of oxygen by having him breathe pure nitrogen gas.

On January 25, Alabama intends to put Kenneth Smith to death using nitrogen hypoxia as its method of execution. If it does so it will be the first time that this method has been used in an American execution. Alabama’s plan is just the latest chapter in a long-running American saga of efforts to find a foolproof execution technology . That saga has carried us from hanging to the electric chair, from the electric chair to the gas chamber, from the gas chamber to lethal injection, and now to nitrogen hypoxia.

The state of Alabama plans to execute a prisoner in January using nitrogen hypoxia, a process so novel and untested that state officials required the man's spiritual adviser to sign a waiver that said he could be exposed to the gas. The acknowledgment form, exclusively obtained by NPR, also reveals that the spiritual adviser, Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, is required to stay at least three feet away from the prisoner, which may violate both their religious liberties.

Since its advent more than 40 years ago, lethal injection has become by far the most common method of enacting capital punishment in the United States, accounting for the vast majority of executions since the penalty was reinstated in 1976. The US government and 27 states reserve the death penalty for those deemed the worst of the worst. Convicted of particularly heinous crimes, inmates are typically put to death after their appeals run out, often a yearslong process that regularly reaches the US Supreme Court – which has found lethal injection constitutional and not a violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

A ruling Thursday by the Alabama Supreme Court moved the state closer to executing an inmate in a way no state has ever done. Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia method, five years in the making, would use a gas mask to cause death. It is an alternative to the state’s standard method, lethal injection. Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air people breathe. Almost all the rest, 21%, is oxygen. With nitrogen hypoxia, the inmate would breathe pure nitrogen and no oxygen until they die.