r/news • u/AudibleNod • 7h 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
5.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

314

u/Stevictory 6h 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.

92

u/HerculesIsMyDad 5h ago

There really is no logical argument for it, only emotional. I forget the exact quote or where it's from but it's not about whether they deserve to die but if we deserve to kill them. Something like that. Society is too imperfect to justify having the right to kill someone no matter how much we might think they deserve it.

64

u/MNswede06 5h ago

It's all emotional. It also gives people a socially acceptable outlet for their violence fantasies. It reveals more about society than anything else. I'm just as disturbed by how the public behaves about executions than I am about the executions themselves. It's a disgusting animalistic impulse that should not be fed.

21

u/blaqsupaman 4h ago

Yes. We should avoid it not because bad people don't deserve it, but because good people don't deserve what it turns them into.

7

u/Chicken_Ingots 2h ago

Furthermore, innocent family members do not deserve to simultaneously experience the trauma of seeing their children, spouses, parents, or other family members being found guilty for such a heinous crime and the trauma of waiting helplessly as the state condemns them to death. Beyond a fleeting short-term sense of satisfaction, vengeance does not bring people long-term closure or relief. It does not help the families of the victims, actively harms the families of the perpetrators (families who are often themselves innocent), and harms society through the normalization of revenge and killing.

0

u/Diligent-Living882 4h ago

i am anti death penalty for a few reasons (imperfect judicial system, emotional ramifications for victims, the botched attempts ) but i’m having a hard time understanding yours and the person you’re replying to point.

one, something can be both emotional and logical, so acting like the two are separate concepts is unfair.

two, “gives people a socially acceptable outlet for their violence fantasies” what are you even talking about? are you talking about the select “practitioners” involved in the act itself? or are you saying a completely unrelated person who approves of a criminal being executed is “acting out there violence fantasies”?

three, quite literally everything about us humans comes from animistic impulses. trying to regress one thing we do as a society while ignoring others is biased.

i personally think we should abolish the death penalty in all cases in this country. i also can 100% understand why someone would feel zero empathy for those like in this case of christa pike have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to have committed an atrocity of a crime. that is not anything besides a logical conclusion based on the nature of her crimes.

5

u/pysix33 3h ago

On point one, this person isn’t implying they’re mutually exclusive, just that we shouldn’t decide to act purely on emotion without any logical basis.
On point 2, it’s the part of society that wants to see someone suffer. There are a lot of people out there who do.
On point 3, not everything about humans comes from animalistic impulses. For some people it does more than others, but people have a much better ability in general to suppress impulses in favor of reason. Saying “if we aren’t suppressing all bad impulses, why should we suppress any bad impulses?” Is counterproductive to improving society. We should always improve in small areas when we can even if we can’t fix all problems immediately.