Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
Ms. Pike continues to receive critical medical care at a Nashville hospital, the lawyers said. The prognosis remains unclear, they said, but they expect a long recovery.
“Christa is a survivor and will take recovery one day at a time,” the lawyers said.
Ms. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug. She has been hospitalized since the execution attempt on Sept. 30, after it became clear to witnesses that she was still breathing after two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in lethal injection executions.
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Absolute insanity.
We need to end the barbaric practice of capital punishment.
Where I live, the death penalty in the Philippines is abolished for almost three decades, yet some people I met – especially middle- and lower-class people – insist on having it and corporal punishment reinstated, believing society would be supposedly much safer like Saudi Arabia (which does carry out forced amputation and beheading, but still is not really an effective deterrent), but ignoring completely that their everyday problems such as petty thievery are ultimately caused by class struggle and unequal distribution of wealth and resources.
That although there were no execution of prisoners during the Duterte regime, nonetheless thousands have been executed for minor drug-related offenses with not even seeing a courtroom, by either hired gunmen or by law-enforcement officials in disguise.
This map is wrong. There is no way you can claim Russia isn’t executing citizens…
But important detail:
I live in one of the “formally suspended” states (Oregon). Capital punishment is entrenched in the state constitution, but state officials have done their darn best to get around that. The governor commutes all death sentences to life imprisonment. The execution chamber and death row were both dismantled, and the state has no way to procure the drugs needed for lethal injection, the only approved method of execution. A “temporary” moratorium has been in effect for over a decade.
There hasn’t been an execution in Oregon in almost 30 years.
There’s the North and there’s the South.
We don’t get along and we are not the same.
We have fought wars between us. The South lost, but was let off too easy, and continued their ignorant, hateful slavery ways in their culture this whole time.
People not from the US need to understand that while the US is one country, the different states being United is highly conditional. Even different parts internally of each state.
Europeans don’t understand that American states are probably closer to different European countries, and that’s not even including the multiethnic diversity aspect of the USA.
Nah man, US states are nowhere near as diverse as European countries. They are more diverse than German landers, or UK countries, but nowhere near as diverse as entire countries (eg Belgium vs the Netherlands).
That’s fair.
I think it needs to be upped a few pegs.
Navalny and Prigozhin immediately come to mind.
I’m not a huge fan of the barbaric practice of making parents pay through taxes for their child’s murderer to eat and live out their days watching TV and lifting weights.
It’s cheaper than death row and the death penalty though, so nice try. Why not just admit you want to kill them?
I’m not happy about my taxes being used to murder innocent people they were convinced definitely did a crime, and a human life is worth more than cash.
Fortunately, you wouldn’t be paying for it. You pay taxes and the state decides what to do with the money. And imprisoning the few people on death row is just a drop in the bucket of what they have available.
Here’s some numbers. There’s about 50 executions in the US per year. If the annual cost of imprisoning someone is 100.000$, that’s 5 million per year. Per person in the US (say 340mio), that’s about 1.5cts. Granted, now that these people aren’t dying anymore, there’ll be more people to take care of. If they live 50 extra years, that’s 75cts each person in the US pays to keep them in the prison.
You are not into this entire buddhism thing?
No, I am not.
For the most part, I agree with you. But for the people out there who are serial murderers, serial rapists, serial child molesters, people who have done horrible, terrible things, we know for sure they did it, there’s no doubt about it, they admit to doing it, they swear they’ll do it again as soon as they get the chance…
Yeah, kill those mother fuckers. It’s a waste of time trying to rehabilitate them, a waste of money keeping them in a cage, and a danger to society to let them out. What else are you supposed to do with a problem like that?
multiple republican states and even the federal government are trying to make being transgender a sex offense and then push laws to kill all sex offenders. Do you understand what this says about the power capital punishment gives. Do you get how easily any “legitimate reason” can be abused
Generally it’s more expensive to execute someone due to all the appeals and other processes you have to go through.
There is no one so cartoonishly evil that it’s unsafe to even keep them in prison.
Most of us have not seen true evil up close. Most of us cannot even imagine it. We just believe we can, absolutely certain in the arrogance of our own ignorance that we already know everything we would ever need to know about it.
But in reality, we look away from even the brief glimpses of evil we do see, choosing instead some variation on the just world theory to make it sit better. An example of this might be finding a way to blame a victim of bullying or abuse for some level of unwise personal choice that makes it mostly their own fault – in our own sight – and thus keeps us from having to deal directly with the wrongdoer in any way.
That’s just a very mild example, but it’s all around us. We humans don’t want to see evil. It’s a direct threat to our innate sense of security and stability – and why stochastic terrorism is on the to-do list of every budding autocrat. We “missing stair” evildoers ALL the goddamn time, in every culture, in every country, law enforcement and laymen alike. Most of us are not even equipped to look at evil, much less determine its true nature or potential for harm to others.
And that’s kind of where I clock this opinion: well meaning, hits the right virtue buttons, but basically uninformed in terms of personal experience.
I won’t go into what I have seen personally. I’ll just say I genuinely wish there were no such thing as “so cartoonishly evil that it’s unsafe to even keep them in prison.” You’re very privileged in so many ways just to be able to think that, and I hope you never understand just how lucky you are in that regard.
Billionaires tho…
But that’s fundamentally a flawed argument. It’s more expensive becuase death penalty cases have more rights. Specifically in the US what is called “actual innocence” is not grounds for an appeal to a life sentence but is for a death penalty.
Ideally we would extend that everyone, not save a few bucks and justify continued incarceration of innocent people by noting “hey it’s not a death sentence.”
Imagine the scenario of an innocent person who can’t appeal becuase the trail was fair but would have been freed if they had been sentenced to death, but becuase of the judge or jury’s mercy, they are imprisoned for life.
That has happened here.
Not think a great argument for abolishing the death penalty since it fundamentally is just saying “it is way too expensive to let any prisoners appeal based on being innocent. We could save so much money if didn’t let anyone do that.”
Are people sentenced to death entitled to a different amount of appeals than those sentences for life?
Yes. https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/how-many-appeals-allowed-on-death-row/
My gut feeling is that access to lawyers matters more than the number of procedural steps available.
Death row inmates seem to have much better ability to be represented by pro bono attorneys’ who will go to the mat on every single hail Mary motion.
There’s an exception to every rule: Richard Ramirez is pretty fucking cartoony. Those vatos that caught him should have ended his ass on the streets.
idk have you seen Dr Morocco in Transformers Rescue Bots?? /s
It’s very disturbing what this caveat implies.
Agreed. Knowing for sure that they carried out the physical act should be the bare minimum to even consider the death penalty (assuming we can’t just get rid of it).
Yeah except ALL the people who are executed because JUSTICE and later it turns out WHOOPS they were innocent all along. We thought for sure we got the right person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_in_the_United_States
Pobody’s Nerfect, am I right?
You don’t agree at all.
This is more difficult than it sounds. I’ll admit it’s much better than a few decades ago, but still… What if we’re wrong and we execute an innocent person? It’s not like this is unheard of, and the whole problem is fully avoidable by simply not killing people.
All other considerations aside, it’s just not worth it for such a permanent outcome.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution
And when years later evidence comes out exonerating someone who was executed, how much are you willing to pay the surviving relatives?
Do we have that problem? I went out today, seemed fine.
I don’t think the prisons are bursting at the seams with serial killers, it’s mostly pot-smokers.
Another issue I don’t see discussed like, ever, is which option actually is more humane? We tend to assume death is the absolute worst thing we can do to someone, so anything other than death is at least second in line… but personally, I disagree. “Life in prison” has no rehabilitative goal, we’re just keeping them pinned in horrible living conditions with no objective other than to keep them living in horrible conditions. …which is torture. 24/7, until they eventually die anyway, which is still a death sentence, just one that dragged out over decades of torture.
So, we’re choosing between:
Die.
Torture, torture, torture, torture, torture, torture, torture, die.
…between the two, if I was the one whose fate was being decided here, I’d rather just skip the torture and die. But that’s ofc the arm-chair perspective of not being stuck in that situation: on any given day those self-preservation instincts kick in and we drag our own suffering out just for the sake of staying alive, cuz that’s just how we’re wired; but thinking of it here and now more objectively, yea fuck that, just kill me.
So the other factor to consider is whether inmates are even in a state of mind sound enough for them to make that decision for themselves, so even letting them choose on an individual basis is a bit fucked. Maybe we need to have them make that decision prior to sentencing, and place it in a sealed envelope or something; and if they checked the ‘just kill me’ box, but are now panicking after a guilty verdict: sorry duder, you’re panicking, we’re sticking with what you chose before sentencing.
Anywho, there’s no humane option in that dichotomy, but thinking of it as prolonged torture vs what is essentially a mercy killing paints a very different angle to the usual death vs imprisonment talking points.
You are pretty barbaric.
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