Cartoon drawn for me by a mass murderer while he was recovering from a heart attack

Christa Pike is a brutal murderer. In 1995, she and her boyfriend and one girlfriend lured 19-year-old Collene Slemmer  into a wooded area. Christa believed that Collene had an interest in her boyfriend. They tortured her, and When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her stomach with a box cutter. … As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her in the face. Pike then cut Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy,” Pike harvested a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a trophy.

She has been incarcerated on death row for three decades. She also tried to strangle a fellow inmate on August 24, 2001, with a shoestring and was found guilty of attempted murder. If anyone deserves the death penalty, Christina Pike certainly fits the bill.  Finally, on September 30, 2026, she was taken to the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. Collene’s mother had come to witness it, which would end 30 years of wondering when her daughter’s gruesome death would be avenged.

But due to multiple levels of incompetence, it did not happen. First of all the individuals that hired the executioner did not appreciate the incompetence of that individual. He started two intravenous lines, one in each arm, and then injected what he thought was an adequate dose of pentobarbital. He did not notice that the injection was slow and hard to inject because the needle was subcutaneous (under the skin) instead of in a vein. A competent person familiar with intravenous injections would recognize that immediately. Because the medication was not in the bloodstream but just subcutaneous, it did not have the intended lethal effect. After two tries, the execution was terminated by the Governor of the state, Bill Lee.

The American Medical Association deems assisting in an execution a violation of the “Oath of Hippocrates,”  which, in one of its most famous sayings, states, “Primum non necere” “above all, do no harm”, which has been in existence roughly since 400 BCE. I, too, have taken that oath, but I also believe that what was done to Christina Pike is also breaking another sacred writing, the Constitution of the United States, which forbids cruel and unusual punishments, which that certainly was. There are certain people trained in IV insertion who are not doctors or nurses who have taken such an oath. Giving that job to an incompetent is, in itself, incompetent.

The death penalty has been controversial since its inception. During my internship I had the opportunity to care for a convicted murderer, William Dale Archard, who was convicted for three murders, although those three had the best evidence, and he likely killed close to a dozen or more. His method was an overdose of insulin, the drug for diabetes. He had worked at Camarillo State Hospital in Southern California, where he would prepare the insulin shots for mental patients who were to undergo insulin shock treatment, a means to induce seizures, which did help some psychotic patients in their schizophrenic world. Ironically, I almost killed him with penicillin that I administered to him, not knowing he was lethally allergic to it. After he was injected with it, he immediately had a cardiac arrest. We immediately started CPR, and after a shot of adrenaline directly into his heart, he revived and completely recovered. His death sentence was eventually overturned by Rose Bird, the 25th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, a judge who opposed the death penalty.  He went to Vacaville prison, where he died of a natural death.  I took care of him while he was recovering from a supposed heart attack, which was never proven by lab and ECG tests. I  got to know him quite well over the six weeks of bed rest, the treatment in 1968 for  a heart attack. He drew cartoons for me. Believe it or not, a mass murderer can be funny but still be fit for execution! (see cartoon above)