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.
We’ve known for literally decades that the standard for executing death row inmates is BELOW the standard that we use for euthanizing animals. I, for one, am not going to believe nor tolerate any of this fake head scratching from those who have been running those systems. This is being framed as unintentional cruelty begotten from miserly negligence. It never was just about the money. As with so many other things in this country; the cruelty was the point.
If you’re going to execute people at least fucking do it right.
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?
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
Yeah, pretty much anywhere else in the world that would be considered cruel and unusual.
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.
I don’t think a doctor at a hospital gets to change her level of care just because her patient is condemned to death.
Why not?
End of life care is different from “normal” care. Hell, it’s a specialization with its own name: palliative care.
And you know the most likely outcome is the person going through the same torturous ordeal again, switching over to palliative is a reasonable decision grounded in medical ethics.
Had this happened in any other way the police would be called and the perpetrators put in prison, which is improbable in this case for obvious reasons. And this wouldn’t be possible in a non-backwards society.
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.
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.
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.
>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
Fuck capital punishment. Fuck murder by the state that can’t even figure out how to maintain a road.
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.
Republicans are the animal side of humans.
Animals are more honest about what they are.
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 severe and repeated abuse for years and untreated mental illness, 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.
Oh the state kills a LOT of mentally disabled and unwell people. It’s almost always been used as a way to get “undesirable” poor/black/“inferior” people out of the world in the US, and that’s especially true with the South.
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
Wildly she was actually much saner last week than in the 90s. She got mental and spiritual help in prison
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.
She’s now the latest entry on the List of botched executions on Wikipedia.
I think it’s deeply disturbing that Bill Lee tortured one of his prisoners by proxy.
'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.
Yeah executioners need to understand and accept that they’re killing someone, same as the jury
I’m sure they would even have a sign up sheet for who gets to be on execution duty that week.
It is so, SO much worse than this one incident.
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.
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.
Same with the old and untested drugs. Medical companies won’t sell certain drugs to prisons because they don’t want their drugs associated with lethal injection, and so prisons that do use lethal injection either simply lie their asses off or use whatever ancient shit they can find.
Still haven’t seen an execution like that, only an attempt.
Sounds like Percy fucking Wetmore was involved with this one.
The thing I never understood, especially in southern states, is why their capital punishment didn’t just involve a bullet to the temple. Like, kinda hard to screw that up. I’m not for capital punishment, I just don’t understand why the focus is on lethal injection, and states keep screwing that up in various ways. Cruel and unusual would be something that prolongs the process of making someone dead or using error prone solutions that don’t succeed, and a bullet is neither of those.
For one, that has also failed to kill people. Second, the “techniques” used for execution are made to be as impersonal as possible; in most cases the person doing the killing doesn’t see the person being killed when they take the action, the only exception that I know of being firing squad, but the condemned is still made to wear a hood. It’s cowardice masked as “humane” because they don’t want the executioner to have PTSD from taking another human’s life.
Yeah, fair. Specifically to the firing squad, I believe it was set up where only one person in the squad had live rounds, so none of them knew who actually took a life. I wasn’t considering the personal toll it would likely take on someone to have their job literally be state-sanctioned murder. Being in the military is one thing, but this level would likely take a heavy toll on all but sociopaths/psychopaths…
