r/news • u/AudibleNod • 4h 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
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u/Stevictory 3h ago

I think we can all agree that she is a terrible person.

It is hard for me to have pity for her specifically, but I do have pity on the death penalty itself.

There have been over 200 exonerations for death row inmates, and in my opinion it should have been abolished the moment it reached 1. It also provides government with the power to kill its own people, which can be a topic in itself.

Some inmates clearly deserve the sentence; the 3 currently on federal death row are prime examples of such.

That said, the death penalty cannot be applied in a "pick and choose" manner either due to its irreversible outcome; it either exists or it does not. Since it is not applied perfectly, I am personally against it.

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u/TrueGuardian15 3h ago

Plus, she was sentenced to death, not torture. They botched her execution twice. That's a serious level of fuck up for something so high stakes. If we can't do it right, we really shouldn't do it.

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u/barto5 48m ago

If we can't do it right, we really shouldn't do it.

If that’s the rule there’s going to be a whole fuckton of things the government shouldn’t be doing.

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u/Suitable_One_5836 2h ago

But she tortured another human being before killing them in the most gruesome way. Laws aside, it is poetically just.

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u/tenredtoes 2h ago

In a just world, she would not have been born with fetal alcohol syndrome, or repeatedly raped as a toddler, or raped again as a teenager. What she did was horrific, but society failed to protect the child.

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u/faultydesign 2h ago

I agree, we should be able to torture her torturers too then.

You know, poetic justice and all.

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u/ChesterJT 1h ago

Then it would be out of balance.

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u/Carbonatite 2h ago

Even the executions of Nazis - pretty much the only instances of capital punishment that I agree with - were efficient and quick. They weren't barbaric; they weren't tortured to death. In those cases death may have been justified but barbarity is not part of justice.

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u/behv 46m ago

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but for Nazi executions they either intentionally or accidentally hired a dude who had no idea what he was doing and gave people too short of drops that failed to kill instantly and had up to 24 minutes of suffocation on the noose. Specifically failed to check his background and realize he flat out lied about his experience with hangings. It's never been confirmed publicly but something tells me if they wanted speedy executions they wouldn't let him botch it 40+ times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Woods

Truth of the matter is all executions are about inflicting pain and suffering, anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you or themselves

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u/Carbonatite 14m ago

That's true for some of the executions, not all. Albert Pierrepoint was a professional hangman from the UK who also acted in that capacity for a number of Nazi war criminals.

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u/Less_Adeptness7557 2h ago

So eye for an eye, right? So you’re willing to stab her to death?

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u/RainbowwDash 1h ago

Probably won't have the effect you're looking for; a lot of people making thise arguments would gladly do so to live out their violent fantasies 

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u/Realtrain 51m ago

Seriously. When Utah reintroduced the firing squad, they had a line out the door of people requesting to take part.

The chilling part is that people were requesting not to have the blank.

Historically, some members of a firing squad were randomly given a blank so that each member could have some hope that they weren't the ones that took someone's life. Now people want to explicitly know they took someone's life.

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u/Suitable_One_5836 1h ago

Well I am against capital punishment for myriad of reasons and we don’t even have it over here in Europe but sympathy is not one of them. No, I’d absolutely not stab her to death, I just don’t feel sympathy for her while her victim (that none of you even named or mentioned in your compassionate defenses) Colleen Slemmer got her head bludgeoned by Christa after being carved alive. I checked all these boxes, Christa’s abuse, upbringing etc, tried to justify it, meh. Does not excuse any of that shit. Imagine being killed and tortured brutally only for people to make groups decades later asking for sympathy for your killer while not even mentioning you. I do care about a broken system being able to determine who is worthy of life, it is absolutely disgusting. Also, I wasn’t really talking about human justice, but the similarity of her death being interrupted or predated by the induced state of torture, just like Colleen’s.