The Tennessee Department of Correction has been forced to cancel its Sunday commemorative brunch. Caterers were setting out pastries when word arrived that Christa Pike was sitting up in a hospital bed and talking. The state spent last week filling her with sedatives. Not since the winter of 1842 has an administrative body been this thoroughly humiliated by a target it assumed was already subdued.
We last covered this rolling debacle when the execution team begged for space to heal from the trauma of failing to kill someone. They had only just resolved the administrative nightmare of the prison parking disputes. Now, lawyers have confirmed Pike survived two massive doses of pentobarbital and is fully awake.
State officials are treating her continued respiration as a deliberate provocation. They have filed an injunction demanding she surrender the twenty-six ounces of state property currently metabolising in her bloodstream.
"It is frankly unprofessional to absorb taxpayer-funded barbiturates and then have the gall to ask a nurse for ice chips,"
a prison spokesperson said.
