The Tennessee Department of Correction says its execution team must process the rupture before anyone discusses what happens to Christa Pike next.
After Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital, Tennessee's Department of Correction has sent its execution team into twenty-six weeks of group therapy. The remaining drug has its own chair and a box of tissues. Nobody will discuss Pike until the chamber has processed its feelings.
"...and what I'm hearing from the room is that the pentobarbital feels it was never given the conditions to succeed," the facilitator was saying, before she noticed the recorder. The Tennessee Department of Correction had just finished the first session of what it calls a Restorative Accountability Journey, and it wanted to share.
Christa Pike survived two doses of the drug on the state's execution table, and her attorneys say she is now awake and talking. When we last checked in, Tennessee's loudest complaint was the parking outside Riverbend. The state has since located a deeper wound.
On Saturday the department announced that its execution team, its warden and the remaining supply of pentobarbital will spend the next twenty-six weeks in facilitated group work. Nobody will discuss what happens to Pike until the team has "sat with" what happened to it.
Dr. Lorne Ashby-Teague, the department's new Director of Carceral Wellbeing, led the briefing in a cardigan. "The state attempted to end a life and the attempt did not complete," he said. "That is a rupture in the relationship. We don't rush past rupture. We hold it."
Honestly, as someone who has spent a career begging institutions to feel things, I found this moving. For decades the carceral state has acted out instead of naming its needs. Here, at last, is a death chamber using I-statements.
The drug has its own chair. Ashby-Teague explained that the vial would be "witnessed, not blamed," and that the team had agreed the second dose was "doing its best with the tools it had." A box of tissues sits beside it. The vial has not yet spoken, which the facilitator described as a boundary.
"We cannot be accountable until we have been held."
Twenty-six weeks is the length of a standard anger-management course. The department chose it because, in Ashby-Teague's words, "the chamber carries a lot of unprocessed anger, and most of it is at the stopwatch." The warden has been asked to journal.
Critics asked whether the person who actually lay on the table might also need support. The department said Pike's feelings were "valid," then returned to the question of whether the warden felt seen. He did not. A second facilitator has been requested.
What happens after week twenty-six remains open. Ashby-Teague said the group would "co-create next steps," though he hoped the pentobarbital would "feel ready to try again." He then asked the room to breathe in for four counts, and nobody did.
