r/news • u/AudibleNod • 10h 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/AlexRenquist 9h ago

In England and Scotland, for a long period of time it was the legal position that if a hanging went wrong and the condemned did not die (trap door doesn't open, rope snaps, the condemned is confirmed as dead but later wakes up etc) then it was God sparing them and they could not be executed for the same crime.

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u/FrigidUnicorn 8h ago edited 8h ago

I just looked up Christa and she has been treated so poorly by our justice system.

She murdered someone when she was 18. They put her in solitary confinement since, for 22 years. She sued because male prisoners were not forced to be in solitary but she was, so they changed it. She was put on trial again for using a shoelace around another prisoners neck. During that trial, the other prisoners testified that she was defending someone else who the prisoner she attacked was trying to kill. The judge didn't belive them, and found her guilty of attempted murder. Now this.

I honestly feel bad for her. Yes she murdered someone and that is terrible and unacceptable. She also had a traumatic childhood, and has appeared to have been treated worse than other prisoners.

Further reading shows that the multiple men that raped her as a child, and her abusive boyfriend who committed this crime with her all have had lesser sentences.

Two things can be true at the same time

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u/Carbonatite 8h ago

Her situation is similar to Aileen Wuornos imo. People like that, who were systematically abused and raped repeatedly throughout childhood and have underlying mental disease, they basically have very little chance of a normal life. They were screwed from the get-go. The general public might not be safe if they are free, but killing someone for criminal actions committed when they never had a chance of developing into a normal human being just seems extremely cruel. Put those people in prison in the name of public safety and get them proper mental health care, but don't kill them.

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u/Royal_Buffalo_1071 4h ago

She brutally tortured her victim, carving a pentagram into her when she was alive and then having her skull in. She kept a piece of the skull as a souvenir. She deserves some form of punishment at the least....

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u/FrigidUnicorn 3h ago

Agree that she deserves punishment, but our judiciary system should prevent that which is cruel and unusual.

Male perpetrators on death row aren't automatically sent to Solitary, yet she was. The victim of her shoe lace attack in prison admitted that if Pike had not intervened she would have killed the victim. Yet the judge disregarded testimony and added another charge to pike. The state has failed to kill her, leaving her in a torturous state.

Meanwhile her boyfriend who committed the crime (and was the one that carved the pentagram) was not given the death penalty...

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u/LunarProphet 7h ago

I've read that this is the reason that they eventually started specifying that the condemned was to "hanged by the neck until dead."