Tennessee death chamber fit to kill again after 26 therapy sessions
The independent inquiry Governor Bill Lee ordered will run as twenty-six healing sessions in which the state of Tennessee processes its relationship with killing people.
After Christa Pike survived a double dose of Tennessee's lethal drug, Governor Bill Lee paused executions and ordered an independent inquiry. The state has now reframed that inquiry as twenty-six trauma therapy sessions for the execution chamber itself. The chamber is due back at work on 1 January.
The intake form runs to four pages and asks the client to rate, from one to ten, how safe it feels inside its own body. The client is the state of Tennessee.
On Thursday the Department of Correction confirmed that the independent inquiry Governor Bill Lee ordered into Wednesday night's failed execution of Christa Pike will take the form of twenty-six trauma-informed healing sessions. The sessions will be held inside the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The chamber is the primary client.
The facts of Wednesday night are not in dispute and I will not dress them up. Pike, convicted of a 1994 murder, was given a double dose of the state's lethal drug and remained alive 40 minutes later. Her lawyer says she is in critical condition. Lee, a Republican, called the episode "deeply disturbing" and paused all executions until at least the end of the year.
What happens next is where Tennessee has chosen to lead.
Holding space for the gurney
Dr. Marisol Venn-Okafor, lead facilitator at the Cumberland Collective for Institutional Healing, will run the sessions. She described the work in a briefing that opened with a two-minute body scan for the assembled reporters.
"We are not here to assign blame to the chamber," she said. "The chamber was doing its best with the tools it had. What we saw on Wednesday was a dysregulated system reaching for the only coping strategy it has ever been taught. It reached for a second dose."
Each component of the protocol will get its own session. The gurney goes first. Then the IV line, then the drug cabinet, then the viewing window, which Venn-Okafor says "carries a great deal of witness trauma and has never once been asked how it is doing."
"A room that has only ever been asked to end lives has never been given permission to grieve the ones it could not. That is a wound. We are going to sit in it."
The state itself will attend as a secondary client. Venn-Okafor plans to walk Tennessee through what she calls "shadow work around its relationship with ending people," using a sandtray, a feelings wheel and a small wooden model of the Capitol in Nashville.
The department is sitting with it
Travis Delacroix, a spokesperson for the Department of Correction, said the agency had fully embraced the approach. "The governor has been clear that this is deeply disturbing," he said. "We hear that. We are sitting with it. We have asked the chamber to sit with it too, and to notice where in its structure it feels that disturbance."
Asked whether a physical inspection of the equipment might be more useful, Delacroix said the collective would "check in with the equipment" during session nine.
He confirmed the drug supply would receive a separate debrief. "The medication did not fail," he said. "The medication had a boundary."
Here I must speak as a scholar. For years those of us in institutional affect studies have argued that carceral systems cannot heal until they name their harm out loud. Tennessee has finally done that. It has simply named the harm as something that happened to the room rather than in it, which is a distinction we may want to revisit in supervision.
Renata Osei-Lindqvist of Tennesseans Against the Needle said the collective had misidentified the patient. "The state put a human being on a table and failed to kill her for forty minutes," she said. "The entity that needs twenty-six sessions is not the table."
Venn-Okafor said she welcomed that feedback and had written it on a sticky note for the chamber's wall of affirmations. "Resistance is information," she said. "We will process Ms. Osei-Lindqvist's energy in session fourteen, whether or not she attends."
She rejected the suggestion that therapy for a room was an evasion. "Avoidance would be pretending this room is fine," she said. "We are doing the opposite. We are asking the room to be vulnerable about what it wants. And what it wants, when it is regulated and resourced, is to work again."
A discharge date
The healing plan does include a discharge date. It is 1 January, the morning the governor's pause expires and the chamber is scheduled to be well enough to go back to work.
Delacroix said the state hoped to "re-enter the execution space with stronger boundaries, clearer communication and a repaired relationship to dosage." He added that the department had budgeted for tissues.
Venn-Okafor closed Thursday's briefing by asking everyone present to thank the chamber for its courage. Reporters were then invited to leave through the door the chamber had chosen for them.
Session one begins Thursday. Tennessee has been asked to bring a journal, an open heart and, for the first time in its history, a willingness to say the word "stop" and mean it past December.
