Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection a month ago, is speaking out for the first time, saying she is recovering, “but healing is not the same as being okay.”
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said in a written statement her attorneys say was dictated to them. “And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”
Pike, 50, was hospitalized after she survived two doses of pentobarbital as the state attempted to execute her on September 30 for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. Soon after the failed procedure, Pike was on a ventilator, and her attorneys did not expect her to survive. But she woke up and later began talking and walking with assistance.
I think she’s earned life in prison at this point. They should stop trying.
She’s not innocent, she’s a murderer, but she also doesn’t deserve to be tortured by the state either. Life in prison.
That she is. She killed her at 19 years old, which is pretty young. In germany, it would be legal not to try her as an adult and she would not get capital punishment. Probably fifteen years and change and getting out if she can be rehabilitated after that. This is just cruel.
That’s fucking retarted. She literally killed soemone and people are complaining about HER rights. Fuck her she’s a goddamn murderer they should hang her. She plotted and stabbed to death a poor 19 year old girl and you’re like oh Germany that’s only 15 years no big deal. Not surprising Germany doesn’t have respect for human life.
She also tried to kill another prisoner several years after her initial crime. That’s reason to believe she’s more murderous than the average murderer and would present a danger to the public if released.
Life in prison or a mental health facility seems like the only reasonable option to me unless she was able to present compelling evidence that she is no longer dangerous.
I was not aware of that. American prisons are fucked up, so this might still have been a survival situation. But even if not she, like any human, deserves a life in a peaceful person cell with decent food. Prison is about protecting people from her, not about punishment but rehabilitation. And if that is impossible she can’t go free but there is no need for revenge in a just society.
That person came out and said later she had intended to kill someone and she did it to try to stop her. Which not all the stories line up but unless she was scared enough of a woman in solitary confinement, I think should could have some bearing on whether or not such should be used against her.
Executions last time I heard, where more expensive anyways.
How? I mean obviously the answer is rancid festering weaponized capitalism, but gawt dayum how can we make 30 years of prisoner rent, food, and clothing cost the same as what should be a milligram of fentanyl?
Most people sentenced to death spend a lot of time fighting in court, which is much more expensive than simply keeping someone alive for 30+ years.
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-to-know-costs-and-the-death-penalty
Wouldn’t that also be true for someone condemned to life in prison?
In any case, I feel like people given life, especially at 18, should be given the option of death, life sentence is way harsher than death in my eyes.
You also have all those costs while people are on death-row and going through the appeals, which can take decades by itself.
Americans can’t even execute people correctly anymore. They just torture them. I guess that’s the point?
You don’t get stats like these if it’s not the point:
You can thank the 13th amendment and companies like Sysco who profit off of the now legal
inmatesslavesIt’s truly the most frustrating part because like we could very easily just take these ghouls’ absurd wealths and we wouldn’t even need slavery anymore at this point.
99% of our species’ problems are self-inflicted by the same people, like you could effectively solve climate change, global starvation, poverty, slavery, crime, and so many other things by just fucking eradicating the top 100,000 parasitic humans and educating the rest about their crimes.
All good, US won’t be in NATO soon enough, fixing this graph’s problems.
True, we’re gonna get added to BRICS instead
Isn’t the population difference one of the biggest factors to consider when looking at this graph? I mean, the USA has a population x7.5 larger than Canada.
Uhhh I might be misunderstanding your question but if I’m not: that’s why it’s incarcerated per 100,000 rather than just the actual amounts?
By and large that is the point. It’s an extension of protestantism and Christian and abrahamic philosophy more broadly: a philosophical imagining that by creating pain in one place you undo pain in another.
By engaging in a known wrong (murder), this somehow acts as a counterweight to some other known wrong (also murder).
It’s pretty juvenile.
It’s revenge, but it’s also avoiding responsibility. The words say it, “sentenced to death, and may God have mercy on your soul”. Everyone already lost. The victims. The murderer. Society. Killing doesn’t solve anything, it doesn’t deter more murders, it just removes them from being the state’s problem.
And it doesn’t allow us to pursue the question everyone asks, why did this happen? Because they’re dead.
What’s the legality with this ?
Is she still going to be executed…again?
Doubtful. They had their chance and botched it. They are going to want to draw as little attention to this as possible. Likely just keep her locked up for life.
This has happened before and the court ruled the person was still condemned to die, at least one person has been executed twice.
I thought I saw somewhere that it’s something like 7 percent of the people fail to die from it. So if that’s true and they gave her 2 doses that day and it didn’t work, you’d imagine the population would think finding a different method would be the preferred way to move forward. Then again… Most people who don’t believe in the death penalty likely wouldn’t want to vote for a new method, thus making it those who don’t want the death penalty, and those who don’t care that they are tortured voting potentially for the same result. : /
She killed someone in 1995, what does executing her now and even failing at that to the point of torture accomplish, if premeditated murder is a crime than how is it okay for the government to do the same as a form of punishment, it feels barbaric and outdated. The only situation I can see it acceptable is if the person is found guilty beyond doubt and their continued existence poses a threat like terrorists who people might try to break out or people who can run their crimes even behind bars
The point of capital punishment is not justice. It is to “heal” the sovereignty of the state, which it deems to have been injured by behavior outside of it’s control. First it’s criminals killing innocent people, then what’s next? The populace killing their oppressors? Honestly the same can be said about the politics surrounding abortion. They don’t care that a pregnancy is terminated, they care that they had no say. The state are to be the only one’s with the power to grant life or death. This is how you reconcile the logical inconsistency of the pro-life people being the same as the pro capital punishment people people. It’s all about the sovereignty of the state. This, incidentally, is also the motivation behind Please Hangseth’s attempt to reestablish public execution.
It is to “heal” the sovereignty of the state
Think it also has something to do with healing the victim’s loved ones.
If someone carved a pentagram into my loved one’s chest then crushed their skull, I would feel a whole lot better if they were dead as fuck. I would not feel comfortable as long as they remained on the same plane of existence as me.
Yup it’s about establishing the monopoly on violence, back in the day the used the excuse of the mandate of god, now they use the excuse of flag and country
conservatives love execution, it is why red states have it still.
There is the tax burden of keeping murderers alive that nobody is really gonna be jumping out of their seat to pay… but even as much as I dislike the idea of paying for that burden, I dislike the idea of possibly killing an innocent person even more.
It’s more expensive to execute someone than to have them serve life in prison.
https://www.restonyc.com/is-it-cheaper-to-imprison-or-execute/
The body of evidence overwhelmingly shows capital punishment cases cost substantially more than life imprisonment cases at every stage. While the moral and ethical efficacy of the death penalty may still be debated, from a practical cost perspective, the evidence clearly suggests it is much more expensive for taxpayers than sentencing convicts to life in prison without parole.
https://sites.psu.edu/bleonard/2020/11/30/the-death-penalty-v-life-in-prison/
Don’t worry, the guy you responded to doesn’t want to follow the law and just wants to take people out back and shoot them in the head based on feels
Lol don’t know where that was implied but sure
The cost savings of extermination vs incarceration. What would you call that and how would you implement that?
The law?
I would call it the dystopian reality of capitalism and how it sodomizes “justice”, “the law”, and the basic human decency we should all be afforded.
Buzz words with no point. Didn’t even address the initial claim
Well yea, the way they do it is beyond absurdly inefficient which can only be presumed for the sake of cruelty. Imo, it would generally more ethical and efficient to just shoot them rather than the insane bullshit the US does currently, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t believe in the death penalty (other than for the most egregious of criminals).
Don’t even get me started on spending life in a US prison though lol, I’d rather get shot than be effectively turned into state property that gets fed garbage for the rest of my life. At that point, it’s a decision between some of the most optimized soul-crushing torture in human history or being given an end that avoids possibly decades of suffering.
The majority of the cost in applying the death penalty isn’t the method of execution, it’s all the administrative/court work to make sure you aren’t executing someone who shouldn’t be, which still allows innocent people on death row at an estimated rate of 4%.
It’s expensive because the pre-trial preparations are more extensive, the trial is longer, death row is more expensive to run and staff, and they get a lot of chances to appeal up to the last minute. Not a lot of the cost comes from the execution method itself.
Which of those things would you like to cut for efficiency? Should we not spend as much on the trials? Make them shorter and speed things up? Should we reduce security on death row? Should we not give them as many chances to appeal?
The only way to make it cheaper is to make it even crueler. Those decades of suffering might end with a pardon, or a acquittal, or a new trial that leads to a reduced sentence. There’s a reason it takes so long.
a lot of prisoners work jobs while incarcerated but that is another can of worms, besides the argument that it takes money to keep prisoners alive so maybe let’s just kill them instead is psychopathic, maybe if the system was designed towards rehabilitation instead of punishment and offered people support to begin with like free healthcare access, education and unemployment benefits, we would have less prisoners to begin with. Also if you read any news you’ll find countless examples of innocent people getting thrown in jails because the corrupt pigs didn’t want to bother doing their jobs or had a vendetta.
I wouldn’t even give them the benefit of a doubt and call them jobs. Let’s be real: it’s generally forced, for-profit labor… AKA slavery. At least in the US.
I totally agree with you for the most part about everything else you said though, I think it came off like I was trying to play the devil’s advocate? If anything, I was trying to say that even that argument doesn’t really warrant the continuation of these executions as it stands. Especially when it costs so much and is clearly so ineffective.
What I want to know is “Will she hurt other people if released?” If she won’t hurt anyone, let her out. If she will, keep her locked up. But there’s no need to execute her. No good can come of it.
No, she should never be released. But to try to execute her again would constitute Cruel & Unusual Punishment, prohibited in the Constitution. The government took their shot and missed. Her sentence should be commuted to a Life Sentence without parole, and she should go back to being forgotten.
Hey dipshit, how about you ask the girl who’s face you caved in how she’s healing. Fuck this bitch for looking for sympathy and fuck those that offer it.
You, sir, fail to differentiate between the personal hate against the detainee and the stance a civilized country should have on capital punishment.
But, considering how backwards a shithole of country the USA is, that is probably no uncommon opinion.
Why don’t we take the victim’s family into account?
If someone did that to my loved one I’d want them deader than dead. I’d be furious if I had to know that scum was alive for decades. It would eat away at me until they died. I’d never rid myself of the compulsion to enact revenge.
A death sentence being carried out can bring closure to victim’s loved ones.
Why don’t we take the victim’s family into account?
That’s why i said to detach hate from objective morality. Sure, I would want that cunt dead too, if a loved one would’ve been her victim. But…
a) …only by MY hand
b) …being incarcerated for decades, isolated, every day knowing “maybe they’ll tell me today when it’s over” only to be tortured when she actually welcomed death…that is kinda worse than just killing her
c) …closure? My loved one is still dead. Now is the killer too. Would not change much to me, personally. Unless maybe a)
d) …a civilized nation simply does not do this. Only barbarians. We’re all corrupt enough, we must not also be primitives.
And you sir, fail to understand that a thing can be two things.
But considering how kids nowadays are so polarized in their every thought, that is probably not an uncommon opinion.
Cute, how your ad-hominem against my age would probably shoot your own foot, as I’m most likely older than your daddy :-)
And yeah, things can be two things, but not here. I can’t hate her and wish her a painful death (if my personal morals allow this), but also be an apologetic against capital punishment because I’m oh-so-civilized. I mean I can, but noone would really take me serious :)
Then act like it.
Okay, I hereby retreat from this “discussion” like any adult would do :)
Fuck Capital punishment
“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said
Nice! She deserves it.
I’m not saying the US Constitution is that great, but even it rules out cruel and unusual punishment.
It doesn’t rule out cruel and unusual people though
as will you when you land in a cheap as fuck nursing home, sitting in your own feces for hours on end for being a piece of shit human wishing pain and suffering on others
