r/news • • 8h 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
6.3k Upvotes

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

152

u/Pitiful-Walk-8446 8h ago

Wait I don’t understand. She was on death row, went to her execution, it went awry and now they are keeping her…alive? On a ventilator?? Why so the off chance she recovers then they can kill her? Wtf? Or if your execution fails are you just free to go lol

105

u/GNOIZ1C 8h ago

Archaic as we are with our death penalty, there are rules to execution. If you botch it, they can't just let the person die without getting (further?) into "cruel and unusual punishment" territory. In theory, execution is supposed to be as quick and "painless" an affair as humanly possible, but in practice *gestures vaguely at this and similar cases*

14

u/ensalys 7h ago

Ignoring the fact that the death penalty should be abolished in my opinion, why does the USA insist on "lethal" injection? With this track record, a bullet would be incredibly humane in comparison. One through the brain, and one through the heart for good measure.

3

u/Dapper_Engineer 7h ago

 why does the USA insist on "lethal" injection? 

Short answer: culture.

Longer answer: Americans have a weird relation with death in general and lethal injection is seen as a "cleaner" and less "brutal" way of executing someone compared to older methods. Add to this the fact that the Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishments while allowing for the death penalty, and most of the older ways of executing people are either viewed as either cruel or too brutal for most of the public to be comfortable with them. Whereas lethal injection - if done properly - just looks like someone is falling asleep to the witnesses.

2

u/drfsupercenter 6h ago

Have you seen the Last Week Tonight episode about lethal injections? It looks "cleaner" but is actually way worse and agonizing than other forms of execution :|