Independent inquiry ordered after failed execution of Pike, who was convicted of 1994 murder
Tennessee’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes after receiving a double dose of the lethal drug that should have quickly killed her.
Bill Lee, a Republican, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after Wednesday night’s failed attempt to put to death Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, at the execution chamber in Nashville.
Meanwhile, Pike, 50, remained in the hospital on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care,” Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys, said at an afternoon press conference.
>be tennessee >try to execute pike >fail >try again >fail, drug gets injected into muscle >pike starts snoring while burning alive >pike receives "life-saving medical care"this is why the death penalty doesn’t work
I think it’s deeply disturbing that Bill Lee tortured one of his prisoners by proxy.
Is there anything Republicans are actually good at? I mean aside from running cover for a bunch of pedophiles or getting us into nonsense wars. And by good at I mean doing something that doesn’t just fuck shit up for the rest of us.
One discussion was to perhaps replace injections with overzealous ICE employees who get erect when “shootin’ and killin’”. /s
Fuck capital punishment. Fuck murder by the state that can’t even figure out how to maintain a road.
I’ll prefix this with I’m not for the death penalty. But if someone is sentenced to death why does it take 30 fucking years to actually do it. What’s the fucking point of giving someone no hope, no rehabilitation, no way out if you are just going to kill them anyway. Makes no sense
The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that " meaningful appellate review was a prerequisite to any constitutionally acceptable scheme of capital punishment." There are myriad required hearings and appeals before an execution can take place. Those hearings and appeals often take years because of all the trials and hearings over evidence and the fact that the court systems are so backlogged.
All those appeals are important though.
As of June 2021, 33 of the men and women wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death since states resumed capital punishment in the 1970s had waited 20 or more years to be exonerated. Seventeen who were exonerated between 2010 and June 2021 had waited 25 years or more for their exonerations and, for twelve, exoneration took 30 years or more.
It is absolutely necessary to take all this time to make sure that the courts get it right. There’s no going back. If someone gets a life sentence and, three decades later, new evidence shows that they were not guilty, they can be released. If they’ve been executed, then an innocent person is dead and the guilty party will never be caught because no one will be looking for them because the authorities believe the crime to have been solved.
Even with all the mandatory trials and appeals, the courts still apparently get it wrong. I say apparently because the courts are notoriously reluctant to look into cases once someone has been executed. In many cases, it seems like the courts will strive to cover up even prosecutorial negligence or worse in order to protect their own reputation.
Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed issued a report in 2007 finding that Ruben Cantu was guilty of the crime for which Texas executed him in 1993. However, critics have noted that Reed was formerly a judge who handled Cantu’s appeal and set his execution date, raising a conflict of interest in conducing an investigation of his guilt.
You are right, in my opinion, to oppose the death penalty. Despite all the effort to make sure the courts get it right, they still make mistakes and execute the wrong person, which means that the real criminal is still free and a threat to society. Also, because of all the mandatory hearings, DP cases are normally far more expensive to the tax payer than life sentences. Added security and special holding facilities and required hearings mean that death penalty cases end up costing 2.5 - 5 times more than life without parol.
To try to assess whether there are significantly different costs between these two penalties, researchers sent out surveys electronically to judges, prosecutors, public defenders and victim advocates in nine Pennsylvania judicial districts of varying population sizes and caseloads that had past or current capital murder cases. In its conclusion, the Task Force cited to a 2016 study of death penalty costs by The Reading Eagle (see below for more detail) which estimated that $272,000,000 had been spent per execution in Pennsylvania since 1978. The Task Force also found that post-conviction correctional costs were 47% higher on average in capital cases than non-capital cases, and that there is no evidence that “guilty pleas for capital murder cases offset the extra costs incurred and other resources consumed for capital cases that do not result in a guilty plea.”
Because the people are fighting for their lives. If they choose not to fight it all happens relatively fast.
In some states there are automatic appeals for those with death sentences.
If it takes that long it’s because the person is appealing it. A right that we thankfully still have.
The death penalty is fucking barbaric and the idea that you can come up with a way to humanely kill a person is insane. What kind of psychopath do you have to be to sit down and put to paper an official protocol on how to execute another human being? What kind of psychopath do you have to be to feel you have the right to sentence someone to be executed? And what kind of psychopath do you have to be to partake in carrying out the execution? Psychopaths all around.
They don’t want humane killing, we can do that. They want sanitized killing where the people wanting execution don’t feel gross about it and the people being executed still feel pain, either emotionally or physically but ideally both.
If you wanted to make sure it was done so the inmate feels no pain we can do that. You could drug an inmate with ambien so they go to sleep, then anesthetize them deeper, put them in a gurney and wheel them into a room where their head is blown off by a very large shotgun. This would be foolproof and easy for the prisoner, but would be obviously barbaric.
They want the appearance of being civilized while doing an uncivilized act, so we have this circus instead.
this is too fucked up and sad. She should be let go if she even recovered which I doubt will happen. Also if you read her case, she is not someone who deserved the death penality… She grew up with abuse and mental sickness, and comitted that murder when she was 18 with 2 other people who peer pressured each other into it. The other 2 , a guy and girl got life without parole but they were just as if not more responsible. She served more than 3 decades and got tortured with chemicals into brain coma. It’s a fucked up unjust system to execute an 18 yr with such background
Fuck, that’s so depressing. It’s wild that the US still executes people, but mentally ill teenagers who suffered abuse as kids? These people need help, not the death penalty.
If she wasn’t insane before, she surely will be after 30 years in prison. It’s sickening to think about.
What’s the fucking point? Private prison gets paid? Just give them the money. There’s no need to torture people to achieve whatever the prisons think they’re doing.
the news say she is in coma. I think she is likely brain dead now
She’s now the latest entry on the List of botched executions on Wikipedia.
So not just medical observation but life-saving measures…?
I am against the death penalty, but honestly I think both may be the worst choice you could have made?
Killing is wrong so we’re going to kill you, but oops we messed up killing you so now you must have your life saved, presumably so we can kill you again.
What the fuck?
This is the white bear episode of black mirror in real life.
Her brain is probably fried so if they do try again they will be killing a veggie.
I don’t think a doctor at a hospital gets to change her level of care just because her patient is condemned to death.
Yeah but if you’re deliberately killing someone, why would you rush them to a hospital after you failed miserably and left them in a critical condition? So you can try again later?
For fucks sake, what a horrible situation. Just abolish the death penalty already.
Imagine waking up in the hospital where they have to get you healthy enough to discharge in order to send you back to death row
Imagine being held in prison for 30 years, knowing there’s no way out and you’re gonna be executed, and then when that day comes, they put you through torture by asphyxiation for 40 minutes, to then rush you to the hospital, so you can be saved and they repeat it again.
Yeah, pretty much anywhere else in the world that would be considered cruel and unusual.
My reading of the situation is that she suffered severe brain damage. It might be debatable if ‘she’ is even there any more for them to try and kill a third time.
Oh lord. So if she ends up with serious cognitive issues they might not be able to kill her.
It is so, SO much worse than this one incident.
'Murikkka, home of the many that MUST have guns, but also the same place that won’t just fucking shoot you with one as an execution. Fill you up with drugs till your body gives out though? Totally fine.
Aw but that means someone would have to pull the trigger!
Putting needles in someone for the purpose of killing them, is exactly the same as pulling the trigger. Plus ACAB, cops would line up to shoot people on death row.
When firing squads were a thing here there would be multiple shooters firing simultaneously but only one of them had live ammo. This was to “protect” the executioners from having to know who actually killed the person.
Normally only one would have a blank. You want multiple bullets to hit the target.
Oh I think that’s right. Either way accomplishes a stupid goal of prioritizing the executioners emotional health over the life of the person being executed.
I’m sure they would even have a sign up sheet for who gets to be on execution duty that week.
Absolutely fucking wild.
Reading the eyewitness accounts from the botched execution, fucking wild is an understatement.
They had non medical trained staff administering it, old and untested drugs that came from unknown sources, they closed the blinds on multiple occasions so no one in the public really knows everything that happened behind the scenes.
One reporter even said they have never seen an execution like this and they have attended a lot.
They had non medical trained staff administering it
This is not unusual. Ethical medical personnel don’t perform executions.
Sounds like Percy fucking Wetmore was involved with this one.
Still haven’t seen an execution like that, only an attempt.
I wonder what her medical bill will be like.
Don’t worry, she’s a prisoner so the tax payer will fund her medical bills, no expense should be spared to save her so we can kill her (also at your expense).
It’ll be a killer.
How do they not have a backup plan or six for things like this.
Lethal injection administered and didn’t work, but she’s still asleep? Maybe start a new IV in a different vein? Apply pressure to her carotid arteries? Put an O2 mask on her and connect it to literally anything other than O2? Throw her out of the fucking window?
Killing each other is something we’re supposed to be good at…
If you’re going to kill people, there are so many better ways:
Long drop hanging: gets the job done, quite effective, mature technology. Sometimes rips a head off (gruesome, but not more painful to the victim) or fails to break the neck (leads to rapid unconsciousness due to interruption of blood supply to the brain and cerebral oedema, then death by asphyxiation / cardiac arrest)
Guillotine: very effective if the machine is well designed and maintained. Makes a bit of a mess, but if you do it in a room that’s designed like an abattoir, it’s easy enough to clean up. Probably not much suffering for the victim - it’s debatable whether one can maintain consciousness, but either way, not for a long time.
Shooting: can be relatively humane if done properly, but can be messed up quite badly. In East Germany they did it by an unexpected shot to the back of the head at close range, which is surprisingly humane, considering what that government was capable of.
Nitrogen gas: leads to rapid, painless loss of consciousness. The victim will convulse, but they’re not conscious anymore by that time. If your systems are set up properly, it’s very effective.
But the bottom line is that it’s not a good policy to kill convicted criminals. No justice system is perfect, so innocents get executed. It’s been repeatedly shown to be ineffective as a deterrent. It’s difficult to do well, so it ends up being expensive, in most cases more expensive than just keeping them locked up.
It’s not a deterrent killing the wrong person.
Context: the man arguing against capital punishment is a political satire magazine editor and the woman arguing for eventually became the UK’s home secretary. Home secretary is one of the highest jobs in UK politics, and is in control of the police and justice system…
