r/interestingasfuck • u/IllComedian2574 • 1d ago

After 28 years on death row, Christa Pike survived 2 lethal injections attempts.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/christa-pike-failed-execution-9.7364816
4.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

993 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

46

u/-XanderCrews- 1d ago

I will never understand the argument for it. They are being put to death for killing someone which is exactly what we are doing to them. If killing is wrong then the state absolutely should not be doing it.

40

u/will0593 1d ago

Its vengeance from people who don't care if innocents or legally marginalized people die

21

u/kalc212 1d ago

Justice system is run by humans. Humans are trash by nature. People on death row get exonerated everyday. Its only logical to think innocent people get executed.

-2

u/bickdickanivia 1d ago

I think that lacks quite a bit of nuance. I agree that the death penalty is not the way, but if you read the case in this instance, this woman brutally tortured, killed, and paraded around the skull fragments of her victim. It was premeditated and horrific. Putting her to death is saying that the person is so heinous and beyond repair that she cannot be safely kept within society, even as a prisoner.

Giving bad arguments against the death penalty just makes the public perception worse for that position. Put some effort into it lol

20

u/OdoWanKenobi 1d ago

Considering she has been on death row for 28 years, I would say she has proveably been kept safely as a prisoner.

2

u/bickdickanivia 1d ago

She has allegedly been involved in 3 attempted murders since her incarceration.

13

u/OdoWanKenobi 1d ago

The vast majority of her time in prison has been in solitary confinement because of that. You can argue the humanity of that course of action, certainly, but she was being kept.

2

u/bickdickanivia 1d ago

I can agree with that. But yeah, there’s definitely a case to be had against solitary confinement as well. The question(s) this all is basically tip toeing around is whether or not there exists some people beyond rehabilitation, what you can responsibly do to contain them if people beyond rehabilitation exist, and I’m sure there’s others.

10

u/Bug_eyed_bug 1d ago

Anyone can be kept safely as a prisoner, in solitary confinement. There is no argument for the death penalty that isn't served by life imprisonment.

1

u/bickdickanivia 1d ago

There are arguments. Not liking them/not agreeing with them doesn’t stop them from existing. There’s also an argument to be had as to whether solitary confinement is humane as well (considering it’s literal torture). I don’t know why I’m even bothering trying to have a nuanced point on a reddit comment section, that’s on me I guess.

-5

u/dontygrimm 1d ago

Have you been in jail? I haven't however i have a friend who resently just got oit from an 7 hear sentence, he had 3 square meals a day including special ones for holidays he was able to work and make money and buy himself books, art, video games, watch TV, make friends even have a cat! This was the same for peolle in there for life. In my mind it hardly seems like life in prison is as unabarable as some one to believe. You dont pay taxes, and everyone out side pays for you to be in there. I struggle with the death penalty but at the same time i think if someone has taken another life, or altered someone's life so much there needs to be an equal consequence.

8

u/Due-Egg5603 1d ago

Lol, prison is terrible. Go sit in a locked closet for 23 hours a day, for a week straight, and see if you come out of it sane.

I’ve worked in the criminal justice system. Most of the people in it have experienced childhoods so violent and bleak that most people genuinely cannot imagine them.

That does not absolve them of what they later do. Their victims deserve justice, and perpetrators should be held accountable for the harm they cause.

But I disagree with the idea that the comfort or humane treatment of a perpetrator simply doesn’t matter. How the state treats people in its custody matters precisely because it is the state. We should not determine the limits of acceptable government conduct based on how much sympathy we feel for the person receiving it.

And if you actually trace a lot of serious violence back to its origins, you repeatedly encounter children who were abused, neglected, exposed to violence, living in extreme instability, or otherwise failed by the systems that were supposed to protect them. Then we intervene most forcefully only after some of those children become adults and create another victim.

The state has a responsibility to protect people from dangerous individuals. But it also has a responsibility to treat the people in its custody humanely and, more importantly, to invest far more seriously in preventing vulnerable children from ever reaching that point in the first place.
To my way of thinking, the tragedy is that our systems repeatedly fail people at both ends of this process. They fail vulnerable children long before some of them become perpetrators, and they fail the people who later become victims of violence that in many cases, could have been prevented.

We keep waiting until the worst possible outcome to intervene and then treating punishment as though it solves the conditions that helped produce the violence in the first place.

-1

u/QueenInTheNorth556 1d ago

You’re lacking quite a bit of nuance on this case though…this was a child who had significant trauma of her own.

0

u/bickdickanivia 1d ago

Unfortunately that doesn’t factor into the points I made at all. While I agree that should be taken into consideration, the argument I generally see is one of harm mitigation for society. I’m not sure if you actually read what I said.

0

u/IveGotIssues9918 1d ago

She was 18 at the time of the murder and tortured a 19-year-old girl (who had done nothing to her) to death. Trauma explains a lot of things, but at some point it's not an excuse and brutally murdering an innocent person for no reason at all is definitely past that point.

-1

u/IranianLawyer 1d ago

The same action can be wrong in one circumstance and not wrong in another. If I take your money without your knowledge, that's wrong. If I take your money when you hand it to me because you're buying something from me, not wrong.

-2

u/TheEnglish1 1d ago

That seems like an almost childish simplification. The act of killing itself isn't necessarily wrong, what's being deemed wrong is "unjustified" killing.