I would too, based on the limited knowledge they have of lethal injection procedures.
I mean, she wasn’t wrong. They botched it yesterday for her.
She sought firing squad before the botched attempt with the lethal injections.
Crappy headline. Crappy article.
Update: Tennessee fucks up another “lethal” injection. https://wpln.org/post/tennessee-set-to-carry-out-rare-execution-of-a-woman/
The filing said the execution began around 8 p.m., that two syringes of pentobarbital were administered, and that Pike maintained a heartbeat and was heard audibly snoring.
Media witnesses report being unable to view what was taking place. They were able to hear groans, moans and snoring for more than 40 minutes before they were escorted out.
I don’t know if they got bad drugs, or if it was some other form of incompetence, but this is not okay. Time to abandon lethal injection altogether if we can’t do it better than this. Firing squad like she proposed is probably one of the better methods if Tennessee wants to remain in the capital punishment business. Yes, you’d have to clean up blood, but that’s often what happens when you kill people. Let’s stop euphemistically pretending we’re “putting her to sleep.”
For the next one, that is. I think surviving a botched execution attempt should get her sentence commuted.
The kind of training you need to be able to kill someone painlessly with drugs is the same training you get for working in medicine, so the sort of people who actually have that training also tend to self-select to not be willing to participate in executions. Which leaves only people who don’t know how to painlessly kill people with drugs running the show.
It’s never been an issue with medical skill. Drug manufacturers refuse to sell drugs for the purposes of killing someone because it bad PR, so instead they support torturous barely-lethal injections to make sure people suffer as much as possible before maybe dying.
Our legal system also enjoys torturing people, so nothing is being done to fix the torture injections. We also don’t have a single payer healthcare system, so drug manufacturers can do whatever the fuck they want to maximize profits and minimize healthcare.
It’s both - lack of people with the training to set it up correctly and lack of the optimal chemicals to execute quickly and painlessly. Essentially the entire medical industry, including companies that could make some profit from selling the drugs, are against it.
You know it’s fucked up when companies will pass on a sale because even they won’t stomach it.
For my last meal, I would like to eat a bulletproof vest.
How I eat my last meal is not your business, my parents never told me not to wear my food.
Judge, please commute my sentence, they clearly botched the execution by aiming at my last meal.
Even lethal injection drugs suffers from enshitification it seems.
They should just move over to the guillotine. As a bonus it’ll be ready for the reckoning that is owed for all those traitorous scumbags running your country at the moment.
This reminds me of that episode on Last Week Tonight about lethal injection. Lethal injection isn’t about a “humane” way to kill someone. It’s more about providing comfort to people who support the death penalty but don’t want to think about the morbid details about killing people. I wonder how many people would stop supporting the death penalty if they were forced to witness an execution live, especially if it’s lethal injection. If the horror of witnessing a botched lethal injection doesn’t at least give people pause about the whole idea of execution, then I don’t know what will.
IMO the easier and more effective argument is that the state should not have the right to kill people.
The people that are in favor of the death penalty is usually conservatives. And they tend to be more easily convinced against something if you can attach “big government” to the concept. It’s not a guarantee, they’ve got plenty of room for double think, but it’s a bit better than appealing to empathy.
Conservatives in general struggle with empathy, and so even if somehow forced to watch an execution they probably would be glad that the prisoner is suffering.
The state should not have the power to kill people because it will invariably be used to kill innocents and silence political opposition.
This was rough to read. It just reaffirms my stance against the death penalty.
It sure does. Also why let someone live for decades, every day thinking it might be tomorrow. Just added torture?
From a personal POV, yeah sure. Let the cunt rot. But a civilized nation does not do this. And dead is dead, a later “oops she was innocent due to this new evidence here” is then void.
Its intentional cruelty. You hear it from death row inmates in Japan, where they’ll show up one morning and 5 minutes later its over. It just destroys people’s mind.
You’ll see government or political parties celebrate their prison system.
Not to mention being granted a stay of execution 1 hour before the execution was supposed to take place so they can review a case that took place in the '90s when they’ve petitioned to have this reviewed since the '90s and they waited till 1 hour before the fucking execution.
How is that not cruel and unusual punishment?
Indeed. That is intentional. And probably rednecks love it. Same as it seems to be fine and expected to get raped in prison.
But well, it’s the USA.
Fine and expected doesn’t even cover it… there was an article I saw on here within the last week talking about how transfem inmates who were moved into male prisons are being intentionally placed with violent men to give the men “some relief” (as the article stated) - as in, let these guys do a little rapey-rapey after lights out and maybe they’ll stop stabbing people or something.
Absolutely fucked.
Just learned now, that she got sent to hospital after two failed “lethal” injections. Peak cruelty these executions. Again, not talking about someone deserving it or not (that’s debatable), but a so called civilized nation must not do such things.
In the land of the pewpews, one might confusedly say so.
Meh, after reading what she’s in for, I dont really care
There’s a great documentary called The Nature of the Crime about the parole process. Ostensibly the program exists to encourage good behavior and rehabilitation, but often the parole boards disregard the inmate’s good behavior and deny parole based on the nature of the crime - which will never change, so why even pretend?
Only perfect victims deserve your sympathies huh?
Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed. Shipp used a box cutter to carve a pentagram into her chest while she was still alive. Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer’s skull with a large chunk of asphalt, killing her. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull. Pike began to show off the piece of skull around the school, and the three were arrested within 36 hours.
I can understand why it’s difficult to sympathize with someone who has done something so heinous.
After Pike’s trial, the Tennessee Department of Correction adopted a policy requiring death-row inmates to be held in maximum-security conditions. As such, Pike has been held in solitary confinement since 1996.
This is why she starts to get some sympathy from me. That’s truly awful and not something anyone deserves.
Also,
Christa Gail Pike was born on March 10, 1976, in Beckley, West Virginia. According to Liliana Segura of The Intercept, she was raped by a neighbor at age 11, and in 1991 she was sent to a Juvenile Evaluation Center after being placed on probation for breaking into a community center to steal candy.[7]
The center was designed to reform troubled youth. Children earned or lost points based on compliance with rules, and their progress through the program depended on those points. It was promoted as an alternative to more punitive forms of juvenile incarceration. By the 1990s, however, the center had become increasingly punitive, relying on a uniform points‑and‑punishment system rather than behavioral change.[7]
The program proved ineffective for Pike: she repeatedly violated rules, generally in minor ways, and remained there for more than a year, far longer than most children. In the months leading up to her arrest, North Carolina social services removed her from her home after her mother’s live‑in boyfriend physically and sexually abused her.[7]
Just going to leave this here - as with most criminals, she had a traumatic past.
Can someone answer me why we still use a shitty cocktail flurry to kill someone? Isnt anesthesia itself able to kill you at a high enough dose because you just stop breathing? Could you also just add an excessive push of something like fent? Like as inhumane as execution is, putting someone to sleep and then overloading them with a killer seems a pretty humane way to go about it.
This is from hazy memory: I think theres some issue about the drug manufacturers refusing to supply the drugs because it would be bad PR, “this drug is also used for executions” type of thing
That’s essentially it. They had “better” drugs but supplying them was already a bitch, they had to do it through the backdoor, and then as soon as someone published who the drug was coming from, they stopped supplying it.
they had to do it through the backdoor
I thought it was a injection into a vein. Thats pretty horrendous way to do it.
Lol, I meant how they got their supplies of the drug.
More information:
Yes I know. I was just making a silly joke.
I thought an issue with using actual prescriptions like fent or morphine or whatever is that the healthcare industry can’t break the ethical code of do-no-harm. So they’ve had to find ways around that
I kind of suspect that this is a legal tactic, but honestly…if I were going to be executed and had the opportunity to be the last person executed by firing squad in the US, which I guess she’d have pretty decent odds of being, I think I might take it. Firing squad is probably marginally less-pleasant than lethal injection, but it’s also pretty fast, and that’s probably a record that’d last.
That being said, my understanding is that women generally don’t go in for death by firearm, so it’s kind of an unexpected request from her. One of the major reasons that women in the US have a much higher survival rate when it comes to suicide than men is that women are much more likely to use poison than firearms to kill themselves. A hospital can do a lot more about poison if they catch it in time than someone having just blown their brains out.
IIRC from past reading, that stems from the fact that guys tend to think less about how they’re gonna look afterwards, whereas women think about how they’re gonna look, say, lying in state at a funeral as a corpse.
searches
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/09/26/firearms-suicide-deaths-women-cdc/75353527007/
Studies have shown that women and girls tend to have more suicidal ideation, attempts and self-injury. Men and boys are more likely to use lethal means such as firearms and, therefore, have much higher rates of suicide. Researchers have called this the “gender paradox.”
Yeah.
Oh, but…hmm. Apparently, according to the article, I am out of date on poison being the favorite route for women to do themselves in; things have shifted in the last few years.
The CDC report published Thursday, however, found firearms were the leading means of suicide for women since 2020, and suicide deaths overall among women also increased.
EDIT: Oh, wait, no, the CDC thing is on the means of successful suicide, not just all attempts. So while “firearms are now the leading method for successful suicide for women” is still a change, that’s not the same thing as being the preferred method to attempt suicide.
Could be as simple as not wanting to risk botched lethal injection. Less painfull to get shot in the head and heart. Well as long as the shooters don’t botch that, but that is rather harder to botch. Lethal injection one can botch in invisible, not immediately obvious ways.
Obviously extremely uncommon, but I remember there being some guy that survived both a firing squad’s volley and the subsequent mercy shot to the head. Might have been in…Spain?
searches
Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslao_Moguel
Wenceslao Moguel Herrera (1 November 1896[1] – 29 July 1976), known in the press as El Fusilado (Spanish: “The Shot One”[a]), was a Mexican soldier under Pancho Villa who was captured on 18 March 1915 during the Mexican Revolution, and survived execution by firing squad.[2][3][4]
He was sentenced to death without a trial, and was shot 8–9 times in the body. He received the coup de grâce, or one final shot to the head at point-blank range to ensure death, yet managed to survive, though he was permanently scarred and disfigured by the event.[4][2]
Jesus, and he lived over 60 years after that!
Chumbawamba wrote a fucking song about him?! How did I not know this? It’s like hearing the story from a barbershop quartet.
Yeah… Cruelty is the point. It’s kinda ridiculous how bad the state is at killing people when they try to sanitize their actions. Any dentist could tell you how to execute a person painlessly. If you just start a normal nitrous oxide/oxygen mix and then up the nitrous to a hundred percent over time, or if you wanted to go even faster have them switch to regular nitrogen, we could avoid all this.
But I don’t think the state would allow prisoners to go out in a manor that was pleasant or even pleasurable.
I say take me out the way they do cattle: bolt gun right through the skull.
Is this how the US death penalty works? I can choose my way to go out?
So, asking for a friend here, one could opt for suffocation by a maiden’s thighs?
On another note, is there any crime in the US that results in the death penalty and doesn’t require, yknow, murdering someone?
Oh well. I guess I could just wait till I turn 80, do a Luigi, off a bunch of CEOs, then die while eating pussy. Last meal and execution method all in one, plus it would be beneficial for the world. Win win?
Genuinely wtf is this comment
It’s called a thought experiment. I recommend you try it sometime. It can be quite fun, letting your imagination take you to conclusions and ideas you’d otherwise never consider.
No. Additionally, Tennessee does not have firing squad as a listed method of execution.
(b) Any person who commits an offense prior to January 1, 1999, for which the person is sentenced to the punishment of death may elect to be executed by electrocution by signing a written waiver waiving the right to be executed by lethal injection.
That’s her only option, outside of the savings clause in (d) which permits any other method if all other methods listed are unconstitutional.
Also for your other question, yes. Things like espionage, high treason, aid and comfort to the enemy, large scale drug trafficking, etc… But usually if it isn’t because you murder someone, it has to be that you’ve done something really bad. Like if you gave tactical blueprints of thermonuclear devices employed by the United States to North Korea and the blueprints for the vehicle to deliver those devices, yeah, that’s getting up there.
Even then, execution for treason is really only a wartime thing.
When was the last time the US hasn’t been at war?
Congress has to declare it. So… World War II.
And the Rosenbergs were executed in the 50’s so… Guess you don’t have to be at war to be executed for espionage.
Technically that case was argued because of his recruitment in 1944.
As in, it was argued they committed treason during wartime.
I did not know that! TIL, thanks.
Legally speaking the last war the US declared was WWII. Everything else has been heavily armed police actions. Congress declares war but the President is head of the military and does what he wants with the money Congress provides. Which seams like a disctintion without a difference except when it comes to “wartime” provisions in laws, services, and insurance.
No you can’t choose anything. Because cruel and unusual punishment is banned by the Constitution, sometimes courts say “you can’t execute a person that specific way because it’s cruel or unusual.” When lawmakers make new methods sometimes they have fallbacks to older methods to make sure the execution goes through reguardless of court rulings like that. A death row inmate’s lawyer might request a different execution method: if it’s one of the fallbacks the state may allow it and show the court saying “it isn’t cruel if it’s what they choose” and avoid an expensive appeal. In this case she has chosen a method not available in Tennessee, perhaps as a delay tactic to get more time for an appeal or different judges or perhaps even a stay of execution from a Governor. Trump has become famous for selling pardons which more or less expunges your conviction. Governors and Presidents also have the power to commute a sentence which says you’re still guilty but I reduce your sentence, typically down to time served. This is typically used when what they did is no longer illegal such as marijuana possession. As well as stay of execution, which, depending on the state, either switches you to a life sentence or just delays the execution.
some states have a short list of options.
