At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, 49-year-old condemned inmate Christa Pike got two full doses of pentobarbital when one was supposed be sufficient to kill her. The second was administered into her bloodstream after the first didn’t work, following state protocols. But she still maintained a distinct heartbeat, and began snoring.
There were no rules in Tennessee for what should happen when a prisoner survives both lethal injections, because it’s not supposed to happen and had never happened before.
The microphones were shut off and viewing curtains were drawn. Attending medical staff then entered the execution chamber to evaluate vital signals, confirm the presence of a heartbeat, and determine whether there as acute respiratory distress. Defense attorneys recorded the information to file an emergency motion with a federal court citing evidence that their client survived and suffered unconstitutional pain, citing the 8th Amendment against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Pike was disconnected from the IV lines, her condition stabilized, and she was transferred by secure transport to an off-site civilian medical facility.
I must confess, because I have watched way too much TV, a Western I must have seen when I was about 10 had me believing that when a condemned prisoner survives an execution, such as a hanging, the prisoner is deemed to have completed his sentence and goes free. My father had confirmed this, saying that the real punishment in capital cases was the waiting and anticipation. The dying part was a breeze, or was supposed to be. (Last words of British acting legend, 19th-century actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”)
Well, that legend is not true; that has never been the case in the U.S., and it has rarely been the practice anywhere. Wikipedia has a just-updated list of botched executions going back to 1540. It’s a long (and probably incomplete) list, but there are only two examples where the condemned was set free, and only three where the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, none since 1885.
That last lucky guy was John Henry George “Babbacombe” Lee (1864 –1945), an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him in 1885. He had been convicted of murder. Lee was eventually released and supported himself by touring and speaking about his strange life. There have been several books about Lee including “The Man They Could Not Hang” (Holgate and Waugh, 2005) and a silent film. He’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.
So that’s what happens when you survive an execution. You end up in Milwaukee….
But I digress. The issue at hand is what is the ethical, fair and responsible way to handle such situations.
Does this change your mind:
“On August 24, 2001, a fire forced staff at the Tennessee Prison for Women to move several women from their cells into a recreation cage. Among them were Pike, Natasha Cornett, and Patricia Jones. Jones was serving life for the 1994 murder of 84-year-old Alberta Coker in Knoxville. After a dispute between Jones and Cornett, Pike choked Jones with a boot lace or shoestring until Jones lost consciousness. Officers intervened and Jones survived.
Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder on August 12, 2004, and received a 25-year sentence, ordered to run with her existing death sentence. She told investigators she did not want to say she intended to kill Jones, but that she “didn’t care if she died” and “wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.” She claimed she was protecting Cornett. The trial court and the Court of Criminal Appeals found that her actions and statements contradicted a pure self-defense or protection story.”
Yes, in regard to Pike. Yikes. Kill it with fire!
Unlike our host, I generally am against capital punishment except under very specific circumstances. A person in prison for life committing another murder is one of those circumstances. Bring on the death penalty. This changes the analysis completely in my view.
The only thing wrong with execution by nitrogen asphyxiation is that it’s painless. Depriving a person of oxygen, without letting CO2 build up, is quick, inexpensive, and effective. Industrial accidents with pure-nitrogen atmospheres demonstrate that it causes prompt loss of consciousness without any sense of alarm, followed by a peaceful demise.
Well, there is ONE other problem… too many people would panic at the thought that they are, right now, breathing a gas mixture that contains 78% nitrogen.. that gas that kills people!
Better not let them on what Chlorine gas or Sodium metal will do to an unsuspecting human.
I believe her sentence was death, she hasn’t died yet, so she hasn’t fulfilled the terms of her sentence. If she had died and spontaneously revived herself after death, the I say release her, she has fulfilled the terms of her sentence. So, since she has NOT fulfill the terms of her sentence, they must try again. I’d use two very large caliber rifle bullets simultaneously, one to the forehead and one to the heart.
The reason they use lethal injection is so the execution doesn’t traumatize the witnesses.
I’m going to take a wild guess (because it hasn’t been reported yet) that she is brain dead due to the drugs they gave her and they just have to wait for the rest of the body to follow suit.
SIMILAR QUESTION
If a murderer is sentenced to life in prison and the cell door didn’t lock when they shut it, should they release the murderer?
This is an accurate assessment. The statement, “hanged by the neck until dead” is the fundamental standard for “capital punishment”. Your sentence isn’t “we’re gonna try to kill you”, it is “we’re going to kill you”.
That being said, when you read about Christa Pike’s upringing – a world of absentee parentings and worse, parents who put her directly into the worst forms of abuse: physical, mental and sexual – one can’t help but see an outcome that Christa Pike was going to be a criminal, miscreant or net drain on society’s ‘goodness’ for most of her life. Given what was noted in her upbringing, there was scant likelihood that anyone would have guessed she would have turned out “well”.
So whose “fault” is the murder?
We’d like to blame her mom and dad for her wretched upbringing. THEY’RE at fault for the murders.
Ok…what were her parents’ upbringings like? Maybe they had horrendous fathers and mothers and the murder committed by Christa Pike is just the culmination of generations of genuinely crappy acculturation.
Ok? So?
I know plenty of people with less than ideal all the way to genuinely abysmal parenting, they managed to avoid murdering people in heinous ways. Yet, when you see Christa Pike’s upbringing you can’t help but analogize to the puppy that is beaten and starved and fed only when he bites other dogs. What else is that puppy, full grown, going to do when he encounters other dogs?
So there’s virtually no hope of teaching a completely virulent *barbarian* civilization when they’ve grown up believing they were, indeed, civilized. There is some hope, remotely, but not much. To a degree, while our society is made up of individuals, and we go to our utmost to protect individual liberties and rights, we cannot escape the fact that we are also a ‘collective’ entity that has internal flaws that cannot be fixed and must be eliminated.
Is that what Christa Pike is? A cancerous flaw that must be cut out for the sake of the body because there is no healing for the malfunctioning cell?
Maybe.
I often comment, in terms of geopolitics and history that 20 years ago is a foreign country. The same is sort of true for people. You are not who you were 20 years ago. That person is a completely different person. Except your soul bears the memories and misdeeds of that person 20 years ago. How we go 30 years with people on death row blows my mind. We’re killing entirely different people than who committed crimes. The person 20 years ago deserved death. But then we let an entire generation slip by and community that is completely foreign to that context is now responsible for doing justice on behalf of a *foreign country*.
What abject irresponsibility.
But in that generation of time, the victim doesn’t heal. The trust of the society that was violated wasn’t mended. No, a foreign country has to make recompense on behalf of a country that doesn’t even exist anymore.
No, capital punishment must be carried out quickly if it is to matter. And it should be publicized or it does NO good for the society, as the community in question will be gone too soon.
I don’t know what to do about Christa Pike cases – she earned the death penalty because she did, indeed commit murder within a society that had largely afforded her every opportunity to grasp the basic concept “don’t hurt others”, but she still did it – largely because she was raised by parents in conditions that almost surely guaranteed she had no value of other people’s lives (not her fault).
But the civilization that decided she was simultaneously a cancer that needed removal AND there was a victim (including society) that needed as close to a fair act of restitution as possible also was a civilization that waited 30 years until it no longer existed in any recognizable form, it’s a hard case.
None of this has anything to do with it being “botched”.
Here’s an excerpt from R.A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie, which is abysmal as an adaptation, but remarkably fun as a standalone movie):
Comment of the Day. One note: “Ok? So?: Bingo. It should matter why someone becomes a predator, a psychopath, and socially dangerous. This is toxic empathy again, and has been a creeping left-led blight on ethics and law at least since the 1950s. Heck, it even shows up in “Twelve Angry Men” as Juror 8 points out that the defendant accused of killing his father has been beaten since he was a young child. So he gets a Get Out Of Killing Your Father Free Card then? Yeah, it’s too bad, a tragedy. If he killed his father and it wasn’t self defense, he’s guilty and should get the punishment for murder. The “logic” really took hold when it was deemed an automatic defense of any black criminal in the Sixties and after.
SIDE NOTE: I wonder if our old friend fattymoon is sipping on some tequila, reading this blog post and thread, and screaming at his computer monitor.
A clear and present danger to society. Reschedule the execution.
I say this every time there’s a controversy about executions.
When I’ve had colonoscopies, and when I had the only surgery of my life, they stick a needle in my arm, and in less than 10 seconds I am OUT. Doctors could do anything to me and I would not feel it.
Why not use whatever drug they use to knock out patients to first put the convict to sleep, and then as Jack has suggested, a bullet to the back of the head would end things. Of course, there would be a little mess to clean up, but the deed would be done with 100% certainty. And it defnitely would be cheaper!
considering how lethal fentanyl can be, it seems like a very humane and effective way to execute people.
or take a cue from the assisted suicide advocates; they want to kill people humanely. Follow their methods.
—Jut
Just goes to show evil is hard to kill. But don’t stop trying. I find it ironic that she is using the cruel and unusual punishment argument given that her death sentence was for the torture murder of another woman. Seems like there should be some some way to bar 8th amendment claims when the convict committed a heinous and brutal crime.
Good point, Chris. All of this country’s means of execution are nearly always far more humane than the treatment those being executed gave their victims. Timothy McVeigh came to mind this morning…blew up 160-odd people in a catastrophic car bomb and was allowed to peacefully go his eternity via the juice. There’s a rather large part of me that believes if we made the death penalty a bit more painful and a bit more protracted, evil people might pause a bit more to reconsider the crimes they’re about to commit.
As for the subject in the OP?…Ms. Pike?…she’s in critical condition receiving treatment in a hospital to keep her alive (according to Wikipedia).
I’m jumping the shark a bit here, but what’s really disturbing (and I’ll add “disgusting”) is that had Christa been a baby that survived an abortion (and there are some of those), a host of people would be clamoring for doctors to “abort again.” There are people who extend more grace and mercy to a convicted murderer and death-row inmate than an unborn child.
“She’s been in prison for 31 years. She’s not a menace to society, and I consider keeping a teenager in prison and death row for so long is cruel and too usual.”
I’ve seen the argument that her waiting in prison for 30-plus years, enduring the wait for the Supreme Court decision and the governor’s decision counted as punishment, even crual and unusual punishment. I disagree. The appeals caused her to wait in prison for that long. The appeals caused the SCOTUS delay. Every delay to her execution was on the part of her and her attorneys.
Set a precendent that waiting in prison for decades waiting to see if your appeals run out or you hit paydirt counts as cruel and unusual punishment or, at least, is the equivalence of a death sentence and you will send the wrong message.
” If officials know that botching executions will lead to freed murderers and public fury, they’ll stop screwing around with ridiculously complicated lethal injection schemes that fail far too often.”
No, they won’t. Your solution of shooting them is what Nazis do, right? I can hear the furies screaming now, “It’s not humane!” We have to come up with a humane solution even though every form of execution has, at one time or another, been touted as humane. The goal posts always get moved because the goal is to redefine every humane form of execution as inhumane so that you can eventually get rid of the death penalty altogether.
We also have no idea how many of these will be botched in the future deliberately in order to keep people from being executed. There are plenty of bad liberal actors out there who will make sure that the convict suffers in order to reach the greater good of eliminating executions. The end justifies the means, remember? People are a means to an end with them.
At least, that’s my opinion.
A M Golden: “We have to come up with a humane solution even though every form of execution has, at one time or another, been touted as humane.”
On the contrary, being hanged, drawn and quartered was never meant to be humane; it was meant to be inhumane and degrading, as were many early forms of execution.
The guillotine was meant to be the great equalizer. Now, even the lowliest peasant would be dignified with the form of execution reserved for nobility: beheading.
-Jut
Indeed, but I am referring to modern methods of execution, not pre-revolutionary torture and death practices. Hanging led to firing squads which led to electrocution which led to lethal injections and, each time, the anti-death penalty advocates assured us that the new method was more humane. Now they point out how unhumane it is everytime one is botched. Their goal was never to make execution more humane, it was to get rid of it altogether.
You assumption is that she’ll come out of this mentally intact. There is a very good chance she’s had some severe brain damage as a result of this episode.
I’m surprised so many people are completely glossing over the case of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947). Willi Frances was sentenced to death, and Louisiana put him in the electric chair, but it just tortured him instead of killing him. Mr Frances’s attorneys filed with both the state and federal courts under 5th and 8th amendment claims. But the state and federal supreme court said his rights were not violated and he was sent back to the chair.
Ethical or not,there is plenty of legal precedent here to go on.
I have no idea what her current condition actually is or what it is about to be, but because Providence hands us difficult decisions, I think she’s going to be on life support.
And then we’ll have a genuine ethics dilemma – that is, where there is a single ethical course of action – to finalize the sentence by unplugging life support – bumping up against a ton of non-ethical considerations such as “muh feelz”.