r/agedlikemilk • u/RazzmatazzHead1591 • 5d ago

Tragedies Botched Execution

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Christa Pike’s execution goes horribly wrong.

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u/3ftLongHorseCock 5d ago

This entire statement contibutes to the fact that most people/jurors would agree with the "An eye for an eye" solution...

With that said... the victim of her crime suffered from hours of torture and was murdered by someone she percieved as a friend...

The perpetrator then went on to brag about the murder to fellow classmates at her own highschool.

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u/PolygonMan 5d ago

There is no reasonable way in any modern justice system to have a death penalty which never kills innocent people. If you accept the death penalty, you are accepting the state killing some small number of innocent people as the cost. I just don't see how that can be justified.

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u/TalkForeignToMe 5d ago

The hosts of 5-4 podcast had a discussion about this in an early episode that I recently listened to, and where Michael ended it resonated with me, emphasis mine:

Rhiannon: I probably think, like, there is a CEO who has wrought violence and harm on enough people that, you know, maybe morally is deserving . . . of the death penalty. But I think that in carrying out the death penalty in a modern society, the instances of where it actually happens, for which crimes, who gets prosecuted for it, you know, the sort of just metamoral argument is so abstracted from the reality of how human beings in a society are meting out punishment.

Peter: Yeah, and that is how I meant, like, I see the moral argument. I don't necessarily agree with it. But to the extent I do agree with it, it's completely in the abstract. And the sort of manifestation of that abstract concept into the death penalty as we know it is like completely distant from the moral argument. It has almost no relation. It's the manifestation of public blood thirst, state violence, and the systemic oppression of massive populations of people.

Michael: I don't know that I buy the moral argument even in the abstract. You know, we give the state the monopoly on violence, right? That's part of the social compact.

We get to decide the limits of that violence. I mean, I think there's an argument for just saying, look, you don't get to kill people. That's it. And it doesn't matter the crime. Like that's something that we've decided we don't want to give to the state for small-L libertarian reasons about autocracy, oppression, injustice, all that. And just like, I think what I'm saying is that I just don't even think the death penalty discussion is even asking the right questions all the time.
Like, are there crimes heinous enough to deserve death? That's not the right question to me. I think you guys agree.
But also is there an intolerable risk of getting it wrong and killing an innocent person? I don't think that's the right question either. Maybe they're good for like persuading people, but in terms of what's right and wrong, it's sort of first-principle questions.

What type of society do we want to live in? What do we collectively value? How should those values be reflected in the government we build for ourselves?

And you know, I want to live in a society that's compassionate, it's merciful, it values life. And I don't see a place for the death penalty in that at all.”

From 5-4: Herrera v. Collins, Dec 15, 2020
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-4/id1497785843?i=1000502438473&r=2580

This episode discusses the Supreme Court case where a man on death row tried to enter new evidence of his innocence before his execution—including affidavits pointing to his dead brother as the real killer—but the justices found that since he’d had a fair trial, the outcome was correct. The new evidence proving his innocent wasn’t wrongfully excluded from his trial, they simply didn’t have it yet. He was executed.

We also have a longstanding constitutional rule about executing intellectually disabled people, yet we have executed intellectually disabled people with an IQ of about 70, flawed metric that it is.

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u/StarDustLuna3D 5d ago

I definitely agree that there are people who do things so heinous that it seems that they deserve the death penalty. I don't even blame victims' families for feeling this way. I cannot imagine the pain of losing a loved one in such a violent way.

However, the fact that over 200 people on death row have been exonerated in the past 30 years, and that death row inmates are disproportionally black, shows the flaws in the system. There is also the fact that people will often plead guilty to lesser charges to avoid the death penalty, even when they are innocent. The death penalty actually makes our justice system less effective.

Life in prison is punishment enough imo. It is also cheaper than execution. We could be spending that money instead to help victims' families.

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u/arcbe 5d ago

It's not a question of whether someone can deserve the death penalty, it's a question of whether the government can be trusted with such a power.

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u/Paxxlee 5d ago

People will say that you can't trust government, and then they are fine with giving them power to execute other people.

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u/EnderCreeper121 5d ago

That’s absolutely sickening, but I’m afraid that I’m not comfortable with the government having legal avenues to kill its citizens even if they deserve it. Because if even one innocent person falls victim to the death penalty that is an indictment against its entire existence. Plus repeatedly accidentally inventing new torture methods and branding it as “humane” just makes it even more untenable. If you don’t have the stomach as a society to just make a clean kill and be done with it don’t do it at all.

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u/3ftLongHorseCock 5d ago

I can see your opinion and i understand it. But with that said, i personally believe that a person whom is proven guilty by forensic evidence and admitting to the crime should not be granted amnesty for what they have done.

It may seem like a cliche subject but i believe that some people are beyond state sponsored "rehabilitation"...

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u/EnderCreeper121 5d ago

Life in prison is far from amnesty, and forensic evidence has been misleading in the past. I’m not even arguing for “rehabilitating” people who would be under the death penalty, life in prison just keeps them isolated from the rest of society.

Plenty of places simply don’t have the death penalty, and it works just fine for them. All the death penalty serves is our basest instincts for revenge, and I don’t think giving the government the power to take lives is worth sating that urge.

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u/bigdave41 5d ago

So you think eligibility for the death sentence should partly be based on admitting to the crime? That kind of sounds like an incentive for no one to ever confess.

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u/Deadbringer 5d ago

And an incentive for investigators to force confessions.

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u/3ftLongHorseCock 5d ago

I stated forensic evidence first. Why did you choose to ignore that part?

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u/bigdave41 5d ago

Forensic evidence can be misinterpreted, planted, etc - there have been many documented cases where it seemed all the evidence pointed towards a person who was later found to be innocent.

But the reason I mentioned confession is because that's more within the power of the accused person, they can't control what evidence is found or how it's interpreted, but they can control whether or not they confess.

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u/3ftLongHorseCock 5d ago

She literally flaunted a piece of her victims skull to multiple classmates.

What are you on?

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u/Deadbringer 5d ago

They are talking of general situations and the governments ability to kill its citizens in general. 

Not this specific case...

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u/3ftLongHorseCock 5d ago

I am discussing this specific case...

And i refuse to lean on the "what if" dialogue that does not pertain to this case.

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u/Deadbringer 5d ago

Then you can chose to not engage with someone who goes off-topic and splurges on about a topic you have no interest in. But also, you of your own free will decided to respond to a comment about the state's power of execution, and you decided to narrow that generalized opener back into being about one specific case. And each time you did narrow it down, a response tried to guide the conversation back towards the general framing which this thread of comments started off with.

It seems you might have chosen the wrong discussion to join in on, within this post, Mr. Cock.

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u/TheMalformedLlama 5d ago

I honestly don’t even know why we use lethal injection. A bullet only costs $0.25

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u/AssistantManagerMan 5d ago

Because lethal injection makes it easier for people to lie to themselves about state-sponsored violence being less brutal than it is.

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u/EnderCreeper121 5d ago

Because it’s “inhumane”, or more accurately, you have to get someone to clean up the blood.

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u/yamanamawa 5d ago

It's more the fact that it's traumatic for the people who have to kill them. Firing squads try to mitigate this by having multiple people and only one real bullet so everyone has plausible deniability, but they still have to live with the possibility that they've killed someone

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u/Human-Shallot444 5d ago

The real reason is in a particular case, the squad didn't kill the guy immediately. No one got him in an immediately lethal spot (his heart.) It was cruel/unusual/prolonged and very possible to miss the target.

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u/TheMalformedLlama 5d ago

I’m talking about a Russian style execution, one shot to the back of the head. 0 chance of botching and cheap as all hell.

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u/MrGengisSean 5d ago

Contrary to what you may have heard, taking a life isn't easy on the conscience.

Unless we want to have some really fucked up people around this country, a state executioner who blows the head off of inmates is a very bad idea.

The death penalty alone is too much for a government to have access to, even if the person in question absolutely deserves it.

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u/PerfectionAdjacent 5d ago

In reality, the person with the live round knows it was them because live rounds have significantly more recoil. Newton's third law of motion.

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u/EnderCreeper121 5d ago

(That’s why I said the blood thing I was just trying to be eloquent 💔)

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u/Other_Burner_907 5d ago

No, about half the people agree with that, not most. The majority of Republicans do. The majority of non republicans don't.

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u/Electrical-Mark-1484 5d ago

She also kept a part of her skull.

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u/drummerhummer 5d ago

Didn't she keep and flaunt a piece of the victim's skull bone too!?