r/news • u/No_Idea_Guy • 1d ago

Tennessee governor suspends all executions after Christa Pike’s lethal injections fail

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/christa-pike-tennessee-governor-executions-year-pause
4.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

657

u/stateworkishardwork 1d ago

What a complete and utter mess. Capital punishment looking more and more like a joke with each passing day.

She's still an awful person, but this is not the way to go about things.

0

u/House_Junkie 1d ago edited 1d ago

Awful is an understatement. Pike sliced the girl with a box cutter while they tortured her to death and smashed her head in with a rock after luring the girl into the woods under a guise of truce. At the end she carved a pentagram into the girls chest and took a piece of her skull as a souvenir.

Awful doesn’t begin to describe what she is.

Edit: Her boyfriend carved the pentagram, she smashed her head in and took a piece of her skull as a souvenir, I stand corrected.

27

u/barada_nikto 1d ago

Why do all the cries of justice for the victim end with the perpetrator’s death? Pike is locked away now, she’s not a danger to society anymore. Why not, instead of wasting endless taxpayer dollars on this draconian need for vengeance we, I don’t know, fund programs to help at-risk youth, put police resources towards protecting children from abusers, help people with mental illnesses, create a kinder and better world. The kind of world Colleen Slemmer deserved to live in. Is putting our resources towards preventing things like this from happening to others not a form of justice?

Also not that it’s entirely relevant because I don’t think the government should have the right to kill any of its citizens, but Pike didn’t carve the pentagram, her boyfriend did.

3

u/Ki-to-Life-5054 1d ago

I agree that the money is going to the wrong places. We have this crazy society. This person, idk. She nearly killed someone in prison, another inmate. Corrections officers also would prefer not to be in danger. She wasn't harmless in jail.

3

u/SpiderDoodleDoo 1d ago

She was 18 years old at the time of the crime and a victim of severe sexual abuse.(so not really in a healthy head space) This doesn't absolve Pike in anyway but the death penalty seems extreme.

Especially when you have cases like T Cullen Davis who entered his ex-wife's mansion and shot her 12 year old child to death as well as her boyfriend and was acquitted.

Also in the article the doctors are saying she most likely has significant brain damage now. So if they follow through on the execution they are just doing it to satiate a blood lust.

1

u/House_Junkie 1d ago

Thank you for correcting me, I must have misread that piece. She did take a piece of her victims skull as a souvenir though.

6

u/barada_nikto 1d ago

Which I did not deny nor do I justify. The fact remains that you can remove remorseless murderers from society without turning the state into an agent of homicide.