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.
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.