Coincidentally with the sad passing of Esther Rantzen who spent her last couple of years campaigning for assisted suicide, there’s just been an interesting case of an assisted dying going wrong. The state of Tennessee kills prisoners sentenced to death by means of an injection of pentobarbital, the same substance used by the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland (only not usually by injection) where Dame Esther had considered going after she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

Pike has been executed once; that, even supporters of the death penalty must agree, is enough

Pike has been executed once; that, even supporters of the death penalty must agree, is enough

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, a prisoner sentenced to death, Christa Pike, survived a double injection of pentobarbital and is now in hospital being resuscitated. First, the state tries to kill you, then it saves your life; how confusing.

Before the botched execution overnight, she challenged her sentence on the basis that the judge hadn’t taken her childhood sexual abuse into consideration, but in the event, the US Supreme Court allowed the execution to go ahead. So it did.

Pike is 50. When she was 18 she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers. The killing was gruesome enough but there was uproar when it was found that an inverted pentagram had been incised........

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