I know Christa Pike’s medical history. What Tennessee did is unforgivable

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 first dose did not kill her, the execution team gave her a second. 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.

By Thursday, Ms. Pike was in critical condition, receiving what her lawyers called lifesaving care. In a matter of hours, she had gone from a prisoner the state was trying to kill to a patient doctors were trying to save. As of this writing, she is unconscious. She is intubated and cannot breathe without a mechanical ventilator.

I am an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. I have studied pulmonary complications and respiratory distress caused by lethal injection, and I know of no other case in which a person was given lethal injection drugs and then carried from the execution chamber to a hospital bed.

Ms. Pike’s lawyers retained me as a medical expert in the months leading up to her execution. I reviewed her medical records and warned her team that she had medical conditions that could lead to a painful and cruel death by lethal injection.

Tennessee has not explained what went wrong on Wednesday night, but the evidence so far points in one direction. Ms. Pike has small veins, which make it more difficult to insert an intravenous line. After the pentobarbital was administered, her arms turned purple. Her lawyers report blistering and burning at the injection sites. This suggests that at least some of the pentobarbital entered the tissue of her arms rather than her bloodstream because the intravenous lines failed.

Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly. I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.

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