Pike’s lawyers said she is back in same prison she’s lived in for last 30 years and will continue to receive medical care
Christa Pike has been discharged from the hospital after surviving Tennessee’s botched 30 September attempt to execute her by lethal injection and is back in prison, her lawyers said on Saturday.
Saturday’s update about Pike came 10 days after the death row prisoner was given two doses of pentobarbital, a lethal injection drug, in what proved to be a failed execution attempt. She was hospitalized after surviving the botched execution and was declared brain dead on Monday.
But in a shocking turnaround, on Thursday her lawyer said that she was “up and walking” – though she remained “somewhat foggy” and wasn’t able to use her arms very much.
Pike said that her arms were burning during the failed execution and asked if it was supposed to feel that way. Witnesses present in the chamber said that “nothing was normal” while officials have maintained that they followed every step of Tennessee’s approved execution protocol.
Bullets are cheap, guillotine is cheap, hanging is cheap. I am pro death penalty. There are truly serious, vile, and wicked evil people in this world. Most of which the common person has no idea the atrocities people commit due to sheltering world views, news under reporting, evil doesn’t always get caught, insert reason here…
However. They absolutely should not have done it this way, it’s absolutely ridiculous. Lethal injection is not a good execution method. It costs so much money to execute someone, and for zero reason when other methods are cost effective and more efficient. Life in prison is a major cost year over year and should be used in limited circumstances. This lady has health reasons that were ill considered for the type of execution attempted. Overall just a terrible situation.
1-in-8 people sentenced to death are later exonerated. 4% of those executed were later proven innocent.
I cannot accept executing innocent people as moral, no matter how bad the guilty parties are.
I don’t think any particular crime should warrant the death penalty. But it should be considered for those with a clear pattern of serious violent criminal behaviour, where rehabilitation has been tried but unsuccessful. For example multiple assaults, rapes and/or murders over a certain period of time, with prison terms served in between the crimes, where there has been attempts at rehabilitation, but these have failed to correct the criminals violent behaviour.
ok so how many? how many years served to rehabilitate? Also. Seriously. Do american prisons even try to rehabilitate? You know. Therapy. Education. Etc. What should be are minimum moral attempts to rehabilitate the person starting from the first crime?
Those are questions I am not qualified to answer. We’d have to hire some criminologists, doctors, psychologists and other experts as well as lawyers to conduct in-depth research as to what is the best way forward. American prisons are a bad model, I am personally not American. I’d suggest prisons more closely resembling those in the Nordic nations, which focus on rehabilitation rather than vengeance and punishment.
That said, here in my Nordic country there was one case where a man was convicted of rape, and sent to prison with a minimum sentence as a first-timer. Once he came out of prison, he raped again. He was caught and sent back to prison. He served his sentence and upon release, he raped a third time, and was sent back to prison.
Clearly this person is beyond rehabilitation. It would be in the interest of public safety and the prisoners own conscience if he was made to stop committing these violent acts, as clearly he is unable to do that. In my country it also costs between $70,000 and $100,000 per year to house a prisoner. Paying this sum every year for the rest of the serial rapists life is an absolute tragedy when we are having trouble financing social security, education and healthcare. In this case I would consider implementing the death penalty, but that’s just my personal opinion.
I mean I think we could as moral beings at least say that while the experts may put it higher it would likely be at least three offenses and I would say no less than a decade should be put into rehabilitation if we are only talking very extreme offenses. if such a combination even got to be we are talking someone who is like 2/3rds through their life. It seems pointless to execute at that point than to just do life in prison.
The entire justice system is imperfect. I acknowledge that to a certain degree. Modern forensics has brought this much further than before. While I certainly don’t think everyone should be able to use the death penalty. I do not want to share the planet with people who commit atrocities against innocent. I entirely believe that some cases that are beyond probable should call for the death penalty. Let it be one of yours who get harmed, raped, unalived, tortured, or something horrible, I am not saying an average crime but some heinous. I bet you will change your mind. Depending on the case, inmates even kill child predators. We have so many molestors out on the streets just lookup a map of your local US area, its sickening. Repeat offenders at that. I don’t want these people sharing the same space as me. Period. Multiple convictions. Not one off cases.
A lot of modern forensics is quack science and influenced by TV copaganda.
70% of forensic evidence fails to be reproducible in blind tests, 80% of forensic labs lack a standardized review procedure, 75% of crime scenes are contaminated, 45% of police departments outsource their CSI, and even if you were to fix all that - forensic evidence is not a smoking gun, it is subject to interpretation - often by experts paid by the prosecutor for their desired outcome.
Edit - see for yourself- is this person guilty or not?
I sort of mentioned forensics as umbrella term. Modern video, cell tracking, overall quality of evidence is far greater than ever before. But I do see your graph as interesting and thanks for posting.
“The system is imperfect so there’s nothing we can do except accepting it 🤷”.
Get the fuck out of here. Most of the civilized world does not have death row and we can still deal with violent criminals.
The system being imperfect is a PERFECT reason to NOT have death row…
You shouldn’t have death row at all. There has been and will be even more innocent people getting wrongly executed. You cannot guarantee that every single person getting executed is guilty.
In this day and age of cameras everywhere and dna testing. Yes, you can 100% guarantee that some people have committed the crime. The problem become between ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ and 100%. Examples: Gary Ridgeway, Ted Bundy, Ed Gein. (But hey, according to you they might be innocent, let’s give them a standard of living better than the poor in our society)
First of all, the fact that American prisoners have it better than poor in your society speaks volumes about how fucked up your society is. This shouldn’t be the case in the first place and has nothing to do with Death Row.
Secondly, you cannot take back a murder. Simple as that. Innocent people will get executed.
Thirdly, Anders Breivik in Norway will not be executed and he shouldn’t be. He should be left to rot without ever being freedom again. Just killing someone just lets them off easily.
I feel that some of these people have not seen the horrors posted online for morale boosting of serious crimes and their conspirators. Go ask all the veterans what they see over seas from any country, take your pick. Suicide car people are often not extremists in the sense you might think shown on the news. Their often innocent people chained into rigged cars and forced to drive into convoys. People are sick. These are not people who I want sharing my life along side.
We have modern tech. It helps tremendously to curb innocent death penalty cases. An imperfect system overall in every justice system across the globe. No pro death penalty person wants an innocent to be hurt. I agree with that aspect of pro life people entirely. But truly verified guilty people. Let them go feed the soil. That is more productive than the acts they commit.
What is the bar for someone being truly guilty? And how would you 100% make sure that no innocent person would ever fall victim for death row?
Because as the law is written today, innocent people are getting murdered.
How could you prove, without a reason of a doubt, that a person was not set up for a crime they did not commit?
And without realising it, you have exposed yourself as one of these people.
However, like them, you are not “vile and wicked evil”, you are broken. Some people are broken like that by biological defects, some by trauma, and some by slow development into a psychopath. Society needs to be protected from some of them, but we have no right to kill, because that would put us on the same level as you or the other psychopaths.
Not broken. Not a psychopath. Your telling me the videos of houthis, or insert your own videos online of people machete chopping up innocents, shooting, or otherwise murdering people and raising morale of their like kind doesn’t call for the death penalty. Insane. It happens across the globe and there is no repercussions for most. Sorry but I’ve seen the vile that happens from truly evil people. I don’t want to sit down to eat and worry that one of those people could walk in, sit beside me or cook my food. While this is one case. I do understand that cases are highly nuanced. None the less. Get them gone. Their ticket should be revoked. Crimes against humanity.
Believing that “truly evil” is a thing is the very prominent symptom of people who are broken like that.
We as in humanity, have extemists or other peoples that chain innocent people in suicide cars and other such horrible crimes to hurt others and kill. People do this to kids, senior citizens, various places across the globe. Some of these people we entrust to care for our people. Our loved ones. Elderly, kids, hospitals, daily life situations. Sorry but those people are evil and I do not want to sit beside them and or have them cook my food. We are together as humanity, not for crimes against humanity.
Life in prison is cheaper then the death penalty by a wide margin owing to the numerous safeguards in place (e.g. mandatory appeals.) to ensure we murder folks who deserve it.
Beyond that, the death penalty doesn’t work as a crime deterrant, murder rates in death penalty states track higher then abolitionist ones.
Lastly, someone getting put to death gains minor celebrity during it, offering a perverse incentive to the especially vile, while life in jail is just quiet fading to nothing over time and maybe a paragraph after they die saying they’re dead. Certainly not the news cycle Pike has gotten.
I could see the death penalty in limited circumstances like the Nuremberg trials, but for someone like Pike, Charles Manson, or whoever? Let 'em rot.
The death penalty is no where close to the cost to house, feed, and medical for an inmate. Last I looked the average cost to house an inmate was roughly 70k USD a year. Now multiply that year over year over long sentences. It’s millions not 6 figures it takes to execute someone. Which IMO is far too high to begin with for an exercution. There are far cheaper, faster, more effective alternatives.
Not sure where you’re getting your info from but even pursuing the death penalty is a massive upfront cost involving expert witnesses and whole teams of attorneys on both sides, then each mandatory appeal on state and federal level just adds to that, not to mention the extra cost for simply housing prisoners in death row in their extra secure cellblocks.
By the time someone actually gets executed, it’ll have been decades of all this extra cost. Pike did her crime at 18, she’s 50 now. The death penalty is a ineffective waste of money.
I did a little research. Supposedly it’s millions of dollars to execute someone which is just ridiculous overall. With life in prison they estimate costs roughly to 1.1millon USD per inmate. While execution can cost 2m to 4.5m which is astronomical per inmate. No execution should cost that much what so ever. So there is that in favor of pro life. Economically according to multiple online sources it’s cheaper to do life in prison. Which I still disagree with as well. But economics apparently doesn’t lie. Numbers have changed massively since I seen them years ago.