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Christa Pike makes first public comments since botched execution: ‘Healing is not the same as being okay’ (www.cnn.com)
submitted 1 day ago* by to c/news@lemmy.world
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Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection a month ago, is speaking out for the first time, saying she is recovering, “but healing is not the same as being okay.”

“There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said in a written statement her attorneys say was dictated to them. “And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul.”

Pike, 50, was hospitalized after she survived two doses of pentobarbital as the state attempted to execute her on September 30 for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer. Soon after the failed procedure, Pike was on a ventilator, and her attorneys did not expect her to survive. But she woke up and later began talking and walking with assistance.

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[–] 92 points 1 day ago (8 children)

I think she’s earned life in prison at this point. They should stop trying.

She’s not innocent, she’s a murderer, but she also doesn’t deserve to be tortured by the state either. Life in prison.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Executions last time I heard, where more expensive anyways.

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  • [–] 2 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

    How? I mean obviously the answer is rancid festering weaponized capitalism, but gawt dayum how can we make 30 years of prisoner rent, food, and clothing cost the same as what should be a milligram of fentanyl?

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  • [–] 12 points 16 hours ago* (1 child)

    Most people sentenced to death spend a lot of time fighting in court, which is much more expensive than simply keeping someone alive for 30+ years.

    https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-to-know-costs-and-the-death-penalty

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  • [–] 0 points 11 hours ago

    Wouldn't that also be true for someone condemned to life in prison?

    In any case, I feel like people given life, especially at 18, should be given the option of death, life sentence is way harsher than death in my eyes.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    That she is. She killed her at 19 years old, which is pretty young. In germany, it would be legal not to try her as an adult and she would not get capital punishment. Probably fifteen years and change and getting out if she can be rehabilitated after that. This is just cruel.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    She also tried to kill another prisoner several years after her initial crime. That's reason to believe she's more murderous than the average murderer and would present a danger to the public if released.

    Life in prison or a mental health facility seems like the only reasonable option to me unless she was able to present compelling evidence that she is no longer dangerous.

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  • [–] 13 points 23 hours ago

    That person came out and said later she had intended to kill someone and she did it to try to stop her. Which not all the stories line up but unless she was scared enough of a woman in solitary confinement, I think should could have some bearing on whether or not such should be used against her.

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    • [–] 25 points 1 day ago (9 children)

    Americans can’t even execute people correctly anymore. They just torture them. I guess that’s the point?

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  • [–] 36 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    You don’t get stats like these if it’s not the point:

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  • [–] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    You can thank the 13th amendment and companies like Sysco who profit off of the now legal inmates slaves

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  • [–] 1 point 16 hours ago

    It’s truly the most frustrating part because like we could very easily just take these ghouls’ absurd wealths and we wouldn’t even need slavery anymore at this point.

    99% of our species’ problems are self-inflicted by the same people, like you could effectively solve climate change, global starvation, poverty, slavery, crime, and so many other things by just fucking eradicating the top 100,000 parasitic humans and educating the rest about their crimes.

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  • [–] 0 points 18 hours ago* (1 child)

    Isn’t the population difference one of the biggest factors to consider when looking at this graph? I mean, the USA has a population x7.5 larger than Canada.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    By and large that is the point. It's an extension of protestantism and Christian and abrahamic philosophy more broadly: a philosophical imagining that by creating pain in one place you undo pain in another.

    By engaging in a known wrong (murder), this somehow acts as a counterweight to some other known wrong (also murder).

    It's pretty juvenile.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    It's revenge, but it's also avoiding responsibility. The words say it, "sentenced to death, and may God have mercy on your soul". Everyone already lost. The victims. The murderer. Society. Killing doesn't solve anything, it doesn't deter more murders, it just removes them from being the state's problem.

    And it doesn't allow us to pursue the question everyone asks, why did this happen? Because they're dead.

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    • [–] 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    What's the legality with this ?

    Is she still going to be executed.....again?

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  • [–] 4 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    This has happened before and the court ruled the person was still condemned to die, at least one person has been executed twice.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago

    I thought I saw somewhere that it's something like 7 percent of the people fail to die from it. So if that's true and they gave her 2 doses that day and it didn't work, you'd imagine the population would think finding a different method would be the preferred way to move forward. Then again... Most people who don't believe in the death penalty likely wouldn't want to vote for a new method, thus making it those who don't want the death penalty, and those who don't care that they are tortured voting potentially for the same result. : /

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    • [–] 12 points 1 day ago (16 children)

    She killed someone in 1995, what does executing her now and even failing at that to the point of torture accomplish, if premeditated murder is a crime than how is it okay for the government to do the same as a form of punishment, it feels barbaric and outdated. The only situation I can see it acceptable is if the person is found guilty beyond doubt and their continued existence poses a threat like terrorists who people might try to break out or people who can run their crimes even behind bars

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    The point of capital punishment is not justice. It is to "heal" the sovereignty of the state, which it deems to have been injured by behavior outside of it's control. First it's criminals killing innocent people, then what's next? The populace killing their oppressors? Honestly the same can be said about the politics surrounding abortion. They don't care that a pregnancy is terminated, they care that they had no say. The state are to be the only one's with the power to grant life or death. This is how you reconcile the logical inconsistency of the pro-life people being the same as the pro capital punishment people people. It's all about the sovereignty of the state. This, incidentally, is also the motivation behind Please Hangseth's attempt to reestablish public execution.

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  • [+] -10 points 1 day ago (12 children)

    There is the tax burden of keeping murderers alive that nobody is really gonna be jumping out of their seat to pay… but even as much as I dislike the idea of paying for that burden, I dislike the idea of possibly killing an innocent person even more.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 day ago (9 children)

    It's more expensive to execute someone than to have them serve life in prison.

    https://www.restonyc.com/is-it-cheaper-to-imprison-or-execute/

    The body of evidence overwhelmingly shows capital punishment cases cost substantially more than life imprisonment cases at every stage. While the moral and ethical efficacy of the death penalty may still be debated, from a practical cost perspective, the evidence clearly suggests it is much more expensive for taxpayers than sentencing convicts to life in prison without parole.

    https://sites.psu.edu/bleonard/2020/11/30/the-death-penalty-v-life-in-prison/

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324804378_The_Death_Penalty_vs_Life_Incarceration_A_Financial_Analysis

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Don't worry, the guy you responded to doesn't want to follow the law and just wants to take people out back and shoot them in the head based on feels

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (4 children)

    Lol don’t know where that was implied but sure

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  • [–] 1 point 23 hours ago (3 children)

    The cost savings of extermination vs incarceration. What would you call that and how would you implement that?

    The law?

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  • [–] 3 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    I would call it the dystopian reality of capitalism and how it sodomizes “justice”, “the law”, and the basic human decency we should all be afforded.

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  • [–] 3 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    Well yea, the way they do it is beyond absurdly inefficient which can only be presumed for the sake of cruelty. Imo, it would generally more ethical and efficient to just shoot them rather than the insane bullshit the US does currently, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t believe in the death penalty (other than for the most egregious of criminals).

    Don’t even get me started on spending life in a US prison though lol, I’d rather get shot than be effectively turned into state property that gets fed garbage for the rest of my life. At that point, it’s a decision between some of the most optimized soul-crushing torture in human history or being given an end that avoids possibly decades of suffering.

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  • [–] 6 points 20 hours ago

    The majority of the cost in applying the death penalty isn't the method of execution, it's all the administrative/court work to make sure you aren't executing someone who shouldn't be, which still allows innocent people on death row at an estimated rate of 4%.

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  • [–] 3 points 20 hours ago*

    It's expensive because the pre-trial preparations are more extensive, the trial is longer, death row is more expensive to run and staff, and they get a lot of chances to appeal up to the last minute. Not a lot of the cost comes from the execution method itself.

    Which of those things would you like to cut for efficiency? Should we not spend as much on the trials? Make them shorter and speed things up? Should we reduce security on death row? Should we not give them as many chances to appeal?

    The only way to make it cheaper is to make it even crueler. Those decades of suffering might end with a pardon, or a acquittal, or a new trial that leads to a reduced sentence. There's a reason it takes so long.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    a lot of prisoners work jobs while incarcerated but that is another can of worms, besides the argument that it takes money to keep prisoners alive so maybe let's just kill them instead is psychopathic, maybe if the system was designed towards rehabilitation instead of punishment and offered people support to begin with like free healthcare access, education and unemployment benefits, we would have less prisoners to begin with. Also if you read any news you'll find countless examples of innocent people getting thrown in jails because the corrupt pigs didn't want to bother doing their jobs or had a vendetta.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    I wouldn’t even give them the benefit of a doubt and call them jobs. Let’s be real: it’s generally forced, for-profit labor… AKA slavery. At least in the US.

    I totally agree with you for the most part about everything else you said though, I think it came off like I was trying to play the devil’s advocate? If anything, I was trying to say that even that argument doesn’t really warrant the continuation of these executions as it stands. Especially when it costs so much and is clearly so ineffective.

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    • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    What I want to know is "Will she hurt other people if released?" If she won't hurt anyone, let her out. If she will, keep her locked up. But there's no need to execute her. No good can come of it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago

    No, she should never be released. But to try to execute her again would constitute Cruel & Unusual Punishment, prohibited in the Constitution. The government took their shot and missed. Her sentence should be commuted to a Life Sentence without parole, and she should go back to being forgotten.

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    • [+] -14 points 21 hours ago* (3 children)

    Hey dipshit, how about you ask the girl who’s face you caved in how she’s healing. Fuck this bitch for looking for sympathy and fuck those that offer it.

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  • [–] 6 points 14 hours ago* (1 child)

    You, sir, fail to differentiate between the personal hate against the detainee and the stance a civilized country should have on capital punishment.

    But, considering how backwards a shithole of country the USA is, that is probably no uncommon opinion.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 hours ago

    And you sir, fail to understand that a thing can be two things.

    But considering how kids nowadays are so polarized in their every thought, that is probably not an uncommon opinion.

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    • [+] -12 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

    “There hasn’t been a moment since that night when I haven’t been in pain. My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” Pike said

    Nice! She deserves it.

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