Tennessee didn’t just fail to execute Christa Pike, argues anesthesiologist and intensive care doctor Joel Zivot in a New York Times opinion piece—it exposed what lethal injection really is. Zivot, hired as a medical expert by Pike’s legal team, says he warned that her small veins and medical history made a botched execution more likely. On Wednesday, pentobarbital was injected into her veins; when the first dose didn’t stop her heart, a second was given. Her arms turned purple, her lawyers say, and she reported extreme pain before an ambulance was finally called more than an hour after the process began. “In a matter of hours,” Zivot writes, “she had gone from a prisoner the state was trying to kill to a patient doctors were trying to save.”

Pike is now in an intensive care unit, unconscious, and on a ventilator, with doctors treating what they would describe as a poisoning. Zivot argues that lethal injection is a staged imitation of medicine that reliably risks pain and respiratory distress, citing autopsies showing fluid-filled lungs and prior botched Tennessee executions. “Gov. Bill Lee has said that as far as he knows, the Department of Correction followed its protocol exactly,” writes Zivot. “I take him at his word. That is the problem. Lethal injection failures are not glitches; they are features of the process.” If Pike survives, he notes, physicians “will hand her back to the state that may try to kill her again.” For Zivot’s full argument, read the piece in the New York Times.

Polly Davis Doig, The Newser