Tennessee execution team fails to carry out lethal injection

The Chart That Does Not Exist

The official account says Tennessee was prepared to carry out the execution of Christa Pike. Thursday shows otherwise: the state’s IV team failed to complete the lethal injection. The gap between those two statements is the story. It is also the place where Tennessee’s own records are thinnest.

Pike’s lawyer and outside medical experts have described what happened in the language of the clinic. They say that in any other setting, the team’s work would be malpractice. They call it apparent incompetence. Both phrases are contested, and they should be tested rather than repeated. A charge of malpractice is a legal claim with a defined shape. It requires a standard of care, a record of what was done, and a trained practitioner whose conduct can be measured against that standard. So the first question is not whether the team was incompetent. The first question is whether anyone outside the execution chamber can obtain the documents that would settle it.

On that question the record is not encouraging. Tennessee shields the identities of its execution team by law. The qualifications of the people who placed or attempted to place the lines on Thursday are not public. Neither are their training logs, how many attempts they made, or how long the procedure ran before it stopped. These are the ordinary contents of a hospital chart. Without them, the experts’ charge cannot be proved, and the state’s implied claim that its team was competent cannot be proved either. Here is my one figure for the whole affair: a malpractice suit filed against a hospital that keeps no charts. The claimant may be right. The hospital may be blameless. Nobody can know, and the hospital has arranged it that way.

This is not the first time Tennessee has been told it should have known. In 2022 the state halted the execution of Oscar Smith at the last hour. The governor then commissioned an independent review led by a former United States Attorney, Edward Stanton. That review found that the Department of Correction had not ensured its lethal injection chemicals were properly tested, as its own protocol required. The failure was not discovered by the department. It was discovered by an outsider with the authority to request documents. I note this not to prove that Thursday’s failure had the same cause. I have no evidence that it did. I note it because it shows the one method that has worked before: compelled records, read by someone with no stake in the conclusion.

Now the strongest objection, stated fairly. Medical ethics codes bar physicians from taking part in executions. On this view, the state is forbidden from hiring the very people who would meet a hospital’s standard, so judging the team by that standard is unfair. A failed IV on a single occasion happens even in good hospitals, and one failure does not prove incompetence. Each of these points is true as far as it goes.

But consider what the objection concedes. If the state cannot staff the procedure at a medical standard, then the state has chosen a medical method it knows it cannot perform to medical standards. That choice belongs to the legislature and the Department of Correction, not to the unnamed people at the gurney. The single-failure point cuts the other way too. Whether this was a fluke or a pattern can only be shown by the prior execution logs, and those are exactly the documents the confidentiality regime withholds. The defence asks the public to accept that the record would vindicate the team, while keeping the record sealed.

Consider who carries the cost of this arrangement. It is not the team, whose names will not appear in any newspaper. It is not the department, which can call the episode an unforeseen difficulty with no chart to contradict it. It is Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, who lay on a table while strangers worked at her arm without success. It is also the family of the victim in her case, who were promised that the sentence would be carried out lawfully and in order, and who have now been shown neither.

There are concrete questions that would settle this, and they are the same ones any court would ask about any procedure. Who was on the team, and what licence or certification did each hold? How many venous access attempts were made, at which sites, and over what span of minutes? Who decided to stop, and on what authority? Was any of it written down at the time?

If those papers exist, Tennessee can produce them, and the contested words will either stand or fall. If they do not exist, then the state attempted a medical procedure on a restrained woman and kept less record of it than a veterinary clinic keeps of a dog’s vaccination.