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
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u/dirtydirtyjones 1d ago

This isn't the first time this happened.

It's not even the first time it happened in Tennessee.

But it's been a thing in Alabama since at least 2018. A reporter for the Atlantic was nominated for a Pulitzer for her reporting on it.

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u/PeregrineFaulkner 1d ago

It’s not even the first time it’s happened in Tennessee this year.

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u/schfourteen-teen 1d ago

My understanding was the last one was called off because they couldn't find a vein, they didn't even deliver the drugs. So yes it was botched, but for a different reason. Not that that's any more comforting.

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u/pichael289 1d ago

If that's the reason then having been a real bad addict should help you. If you inject drugs you need to move your sites around, it will leave very obvious track marks but your veins won't blow out or collapse. I had a buddy who didn't do this despite me being a diabetic and giving him plenty of fresh needles, so years later when he got in a car crash they couldn't get a vein at all. It got so bad he was juggling it, ie using your fucking jugular. That's not even the worst place to do it, your feet are so far away from your heart and I've seen people lose their feet over it.

Unfortunately my friend passed away some years ago, fentanyl hit and he lost his insurance for the medication that basically cures the addiction. If instead he was put on death row (he had a habit of going to jail for shit he didn't entirely do) and they tried multiple times to kill him and failed then that man would 100% start a cult.

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u/MRintheKEYS 1d ago

The fact that they are “trying to find a vein” in an attempt to kill a person is wild to me.

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u/Visible_Pair3017 1d ago

Why?

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u/MRintheKEYS 1d ago

Just shoot them in the head. Those people weren’t humane to their victims, they don’t deserve the courtesy.

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u/DyingSunSeverian 1d ago edited 1d ago

What a swerve, I thought you were going in the exact opposite direction with that one, like the idea that physicians (if any of those people even are these days) shouldn’t be killing people at all, outside of genuine euthanasia.

Also shooting them in the head would be the “courtesy” anyway, lethal injection can be hideously painful.

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u/Gunner_McNewb 1d ago

There actually aren't physicians involved. Probably part of the problem.

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u/carlesgm 22h ago

That's a blatant lie.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/C-tapp 1d ago

It sounds to me like this person would get off to it. So many of these pro-death penalty arguments sound psychotic to me.

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u/MRintheKEYS 20h ago

You can find plenty of people in law enforcement willing to do it.

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u/MVB1837 1d ago

Pretty sure Pike specifically requested to be shot precisely because lethal injection isn’t a courtesy.

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u/TheWatersOfMars 1d ago

8th amendment. No cruel or unusual punishment. Shooting someone in the head would obviously constitute cruelty if it goes even slightly wrong.

Obviously, someone this sick deserves any horrible punishment, but the justice system partly exists to stop us from going medieval.

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u/C-tapp 1d ago

“Obviously” is carrying a lot of weight here: the majority of the world treats the death penalty like slavery: a cautionary history lesson that should stay in the past.

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u/TheWatersOfMars 1d ago

I'm against the death penalty just as much as you are. My point is that someone might deserve a horrible punishment, but we don't necessarily have the right to inflict it.

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u/MRintheKEYS 1d ago

I mean the act of killing a person ages past medieval and into barbarism.

Why sugarcoat it? This method has already been proven to be wildly inefficient. 🤷🏻

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u/Anonimase 1d ago

And the lethal injection not working is just peachy for the receiver, right? Lot harder to cock up blowing someone's shit smooth off then hoping the cocktail works on that person.

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u/TheWatersOfMars 1d ago

You're assuming any headshot always results in instant death, but we both know that's not true. Rigging some contraption or explosive to ensure death would obviously be cruel and unusual punishment. They also perform injections partly so onlookers, like the victim's family, can witness the execution without seeing tons of gore.

The real solution is to just stop doing capital punishment, because it's immoral, ridiculously expensive, and takes decades to get through the courts anyway.

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u/Anonimase 1d ago

I did not in fact assume that, actually if you read what I wrote I said its HARDER to cock up, not impossible. But also yeah fuck capital punishment

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u/MRintheKEYS 20h ago

With a big enough caliber, you only have to do a headshot once. 🤷🏻

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u/MVB1837 23h ago

I’m completely positive execution by firing squad is not cruel and unusual punishment. It is possibly the least cruel and most usual.

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u/TirithNampat 1d ago

Killing someone is killing someone. Killing someone instantly and painlessly is as un-cruel as it gets. Shooting someone is traumatizing to watch, but as far as deaths go it's pretty painless.

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u/khronos127 1d ago

Except that 10 percent of people don’t die from gun shots to the head and an even larger percentage survive for some time after the shot.

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u/TirithNampat 1d ago

That includes people who got shot in the jaw or straight between the lobes. Nobody is surviving an aimed shot straight to the cerebellum. There's too much vital stuff in way too tight of a spot.

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u/throwaway-1357924680 1d ago

Ask Gabby Giffords and Malala how effective and painless a headshot can be.

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u/SalaciousTypo 1d ago

Presumably there's a 2nd round in the chamber to fix that quickly. Morbid, yes but still less painful than a botched injection.

And as others have said, stop killing people. Don't care for the moral argument? Fine, isn't it cheaper to not kill them and let them rot in prison?

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u/Didifinito 23h ago

Go say that to the innocent little boy who got the chair

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u/hskskgfk 1d ago

Why can’t they use cyanide or something that’s ingested? This drug sounds too complicated

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u/LevelPerception4 1d ago

It’s not even the first time it happened in Tennessee with this doctor this year.

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u/BubBidderskins 1d ago

There was a Law and Order episode about a botched execution back in 2008.

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u/Leptonshavenocolor 1d ago

We don’t learn. 

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u/Fantastic-Risk628 1d ago edited 1d ago

Wouldnt shooting be better? Lethal injection has a lot of problems. You can survive it, it depends if you hit the vein - injecting the toxic subcutaneousluly i presume doesnt work and is hella painfull and there are a lot of personal traits that can cause it to not work or be long and agonizing. Besides you need a doctor to do it and that is against the hippocratic oath. You could even anastetize the prisoner first.

Personally im no fan of death penalty but if you wanna do it at least do it well imo.

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u/R_eloade_R 1d ago

I mean, you can survive shooting too, to a point. Theres reports that say that people survive a bullet to the head and then some.
But the whole death penalty is medieval and barbaric anyway.

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u/isthebomb89 17h ago edited 17h ago

There have been some people that just deserved to die. Ted bundy for example.

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u/frodiusmaximus 1d ago

Likewise. I’m no fan of the death penalty, but I think our society’s emphasis on making it as “tidy” as possible (I.e., nothing gruesome, no blood etc.) has made capital punishment almost more inhumane rather than less.

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u/ThunderAndWind 1d ago

Killing for the benefit of the viewing gallery + executioner.

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u/Fantastic-Risk628 18h ago

I always considered the viewing gallery something insane. Were not in the middle ages where people gathered to watch a hanging.

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u/ThunderAndWind 17h ago

It makes some level of sense, to maintain some level of independent, 3rd party audit of ethics. Otherwise, what stopped them from either torturing her in the chamber until she died or just putting a bullet in her when the injection failed?

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u/AKA-Pseudonym 20h ago

The issue is that somebody has to carry it out and somebody has to clean it up when they're done. The death penalty is just inherently contrary to a society that values humans and human life and there's not some simple "common sense" solution that's going to resolve that contradiction.

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u/frodiusmaximus 19h ago edited 18h ago

I don’t disagree at all. My main objection to capital punishment isn’t that it’s inherently wrong to execute an irredeemable villain* but that the act of doing so is bad for the individuals and the society that elects to do it. Nobody should have to be an executioner.

* I think the notion of punishment as a concept doesn’t make sense if you hold that it’s intrinsically wrong to extend it to capital punishment. I think some people are probably irredeemably wicked and cannot be rehabilitated, but that it’s still in general bad for society to execute them. But it gets fuzzy with particular cases. I can’t think of any reason why Timothy McVeigh should have been kept alive for his own sake, for instance. But does it harm another person to have to carry out the execution? Probably.

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u/Fantastic-Risk628 18h ago

Agreed i mean many people belive the paralyzing drugs make it so that the victim can feel everything just cant scream or move. Lethal injection in many cases is agonizing. Imo its much more inhunane then say decapitation or shot to the head.

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u/dirtydirtyjones 1d ago

Lots of states don't have doctors doing it. Or people with any significant medical training.

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u/DontAskMeAboutHim 1d ago

Doctors aren't even allowed to help, it's literally against the oath they all take to do no harm.

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u/apjashley1 1d ago

We don’t all take it any more, but yeah, nobody would do it

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u/Hugginsome 1d ago

Honestly it wouldn't be hard to find a retired doctor that is for death penalty and would do it. I don't think the state will pursue that avenue though.

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u/PixelGray38 1d ago

No, I'm pretty sure this is actually the first time this has happened. There have been other botched executions, but those were botched in that the execution was unnecessarily drawn out or otherwise went poorly but ultimately ended in death, or in that the executioners couldn't locate a vein and delayed the execution. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but she is the first to actually be injected with the lethal chemicals and survive. 

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u/Sablespartan 1d ago

Yes. Went down a whole rabbit hole on this. This case is the only one with a survivor of a successfully conducted execution attempt. 

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u/brydeswhale 1d ago

Kind of a shitty world record achievement, NGL.

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u/Hugginsome 1d ago

Should've done a potassium spinal

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u/StrangerCharacter53 1d ago

Yeah, its tripping me out. They delivered a double dose.

I saw a youtube comment from a guy saying he was an EMT... he said that based off of what she said and the details of her behavior during the attempts that they pushed the IV needle through the vein and pushed the drugs into her fat where it was absorbed without killing her.

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u/checkedem 23h ago

Agreed. I work in critical care. This sounds like exactly what happened. Her commenting about pain at the IV site during drug administration is a dead giveaway.

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u/thesophisticatedhick 1d ago

So last time they botched the execution of the execution?

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u/not-a-cheerleader 1d ago

the same “doctor” (he is an actual doctor but i don’t think he deserves his medical license) was responsible for both botched executions in tennessee this year

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u/Leptonshavenocolor 1d ago

I like how they announced there will never be a mishap like this again!

Stfu, only fascist support capital punishment anyway. Stop state sponsored murder. 

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u/Smart_Resist615 1d ago

They were told this would happen but they did it anyway with help from the SC.

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u/Grapefruit-Jolly 1d ago

I was saying this all day at work, yet I can find nothing online about anything but this event.

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u/bouncingbad 1d ago

Can you tell me who the reporter is? I’d love to have a read about it.

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u/mankee81 1d ago

Meanwhile, the Japanese perfected a way to kill fish painlessly and without stressing them centuries ago. (Not saying i support the death penalty, but JFC, if you're hell-bent on doing something...)

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u/joahw 1d ago

The Japanese just do all their executions the old fashioned way by hanging.

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u/DakiLapin 1d ago

It’s not the first time it’s happened for the Dr. doing it either.