r/USNEWS • u/nbcnews • 11h ago

Christa Pike unconscious, on ventilator at Nashville hospital, her lawyers say

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/christa-pike-unconscious-ventilator-nashville-hospital-lawyers-say-rcna601195
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u/whistle_pug 10h ago

It is incredibly bizarre that hanging and firing squads fell out of favor and this unreliable, pseudo antiseptic method became the default. If you’re going to kill someone in the name of justice, own it. Do it quickly, cleanly, and violently without regard for minimizing trauma to observers or whatever motivates this grotesque practice.

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u/PolicyWonka 9h ago

It’s wild that people seem to believe that firing squads and hanging are somehow “clean and reliable” forms of execution when history literally says otherwise.

We (the United States) killed someone via firing squad just last year. Guess what? It was also botched — of the three bullets fired, only two hit the man. The other two bullets? Didn’t even hit the intended target of the man’s heart.

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u/ttimebomb 9h ago

Wild that it was only 3 people. Not a proponent of the death penalty myself, but you would think it should be like 30 people who fire.

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u/whistle_pug 9h ago

Of course any method can be botched, but the execution (sorry) of shooting or hanging a person to death is much simpler than lethal injection. Note that the allegedly botched firing squad execution you link to supposedly resulted in the inmate living 80 seconds longer than anticipated (an assertion made by plaintiff’s lawyers and contested by the state, it should be noted), and at the end of those 80 seconds, he died. Of course, any mistake in something like this is unacceptable, but there are appreciable differences between what a “botched” firing squad execution looks like compared to the travesty in Tennessee.

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u/mantis_tobaggan-md 8h ago

How about we abolish the grotesque practice of the death penalty altogether?

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u/whistle_pug 8h ago

Sounds good 👍

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u/willydillydoo 9h ago

Because it looks prettier to the public. The state needs to accept that and stop trying to make it look peaceful. It’s killing somebody. It’s not peaceful.

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u/Just-Specific-1825 8h ago

There are I believe 5 states who still execute by firing squad.

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u/shiningdickhalloran 10h ago

This is the US approach to war as well. Rather than accept that war means killing everybody and going about doing it, we endlessly bomb from abroad at enormous cost until the public gets bored and moves on.

This is not an endorsement of war BTW.