Independent inquiry ordered after failed execution of Pike, who was convicted of 1994 murder
Tennessee’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes after receiving a double dose of the lethal drug that should have quickly killed her.
Bill Lee, a Republican, has suspended all executions in the state until at least the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry after Wednesday night’s failed attempt to put to death Christa Pike, who was convicted of murder, at the execution chamber in Nashville.
Meanwhile, Pike, 50, remained in the hospital on Thursday afternoon. “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care,” Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys, said at an afternoon press conference.
So not just medical observation but life-saving measures…?
I am against the death penalty, but honestly I think both may be the worst choice you could have made?
Killing is wrong so we’re going to kill you, but oops we messed up killing you so now you must have your life saved, presumably so we can kill you again.
What the fuck?
Imagine waking up in the hospital where they have to get you healthy enough to discharge in order to send you back to death row
I don’t think a doctor at a hospital gets to change her level of care just because her patient is condemned to death.
Yeah but if you’re deliberately killing someone, why would you rush them to a hospital after you failed miserably and left them in a critical condition? So you can try again later?
For fucks sake, what a horrible situation. Just abolish the death penalty already.
My reading of the situation is that she suffered severe brain damage. It might be debatable if ‘she’ is even there any more for them to try and kill a third time.
Her brain is probably fried so if they do try again they will be killing a veggie.
It is so, SO much worse than this one incident.
this is too fucked up and sad. She should be let go if she even recovered which I doubt will happen. Also if you read her case, she is not someone who deserved the death penality… She grew up with severe and repeated abuse for years and untreated mental illness, and comitted that murder when she was 18 with 2 other people who peer pressured each other into it. The other 2 , a guy and girl got life without parole but they were just as if not more responsible. She served more than 3 decades and got tortured with chemicals into brain coma. It’s a fucked up unjust system to execute an 18 yr with such background
Fuck, that’s so depressing. It’s wild that the US still executes people, but mentally ill teenagers who suffered abuse as kids? These people need help, not the death penalty.
Oh the state kills a LOT of mentally disabled and unwell people. It’s almost always been used as a way to get “undesirable” poor/black/“inferior” people out of the world in the US, and that’s especially true with the South.
She’s now the latest entry on the List of botched executions on Wikipedia.
Fuck capital punishment. Fuck murder by the state that can’t even figure out how to maintain a road.
I’ll prefix this with I’m not for the death penalty. But if someone is sentenced to death why does it take 30 fucking years to actually do it. What’s the fucking point of giving someone no hope, no rehabilitation, no way out if you are just going to kill them anyway. Makes no sense
Because the people are fighting for their lives. If they choose not to fight it all happens relatively fast.
In some states there are automatic appeals for those with death sentences.
The death penalty is fucking barbaric and the idea that you can come up with a way to humanely kill a person is insane. What kind of psychopath do you have to be to sit down and put to paper an official protocol on how to execute another human being? What kind of psychopath do you have to be to feel you have the right to sentence someone to be executed? And what kind of psychopath do you have to be to partake in carrying out the execution? Psychopaths all around.
They don’t want humane killing, we can do that. They want sanitized killing where the people wanting execution don’t feel gross about it and the people being executed still feel pain, either emotionally or physically but ideally both.
If you wanted to make sure it was done so the inmate feels no pain we can do that. You could drug an inmate with ambien so they go to sleep, then anesthetize them deeper, put them in a gurney and wheel them into a room where their head is blown off by a very large shotgun. This would be foolproof and easy for the prisoner, but would be obviously barbaric.
They want the appearance of being civilized while doing an uncivilized act, so we have this circus instead.
I wonder what her medical bill will be like.
Don’t worry, she’s a prisoner so the tax payer will fund her medical bills, no expense should be spared to save her so we can kill her (also at your expense).
It’ll be a killer.
Is there anything Republicans are actually good at? I mean aside from running cover for a bunch of pedophiles or getting us into nonsense wars. And by good at I mean doing something that doesn’t just fuck shit up for the rest of us.
Republicans are the animal side of humans.
Animals are more honest about what they are.
We’ve known for literally decades that the standard for executing death row inmates is BELOW the standard that we use for euthanizing animals. I, for one, am not going to believe nor tolerate any of this fake head scratching from those who have been running those systems. This is being framed as unintentional cruelty begotten from miserly negligence. It never was just about the money. As with so many other things in this country; the cruelty was the point.
Good, hopefully they stop them for good
