I suppose it would be helpful to know what “Lucky Crista” had done to warrant execution. While living at the Job Corps training campus, Pike, then 18, became convinced that fellow student Colleen Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. On January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, and two others invited Slemmer to join them in the woods to smoke pot. There they attacked her. For the next 30 minutes, Slemmer was beaten and slashed with a box cutter. A pentagram was carved into the girls’ chest before Pike crushed Slemmer’s skull with a large chunk of asphalt. Then Crista kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull and showed it to other students at the school, leading to her arrest.
Yeah, I’d say Pike deserved the death penalty.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Now what?
My not-quite-certain answer before I read your brilliant analysis: I think in cases like Crista’s, declaring that she has served her sentence and releasing her is the most ethical response. 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. 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. Have the condemned prisoner led blindfolded to a chair, and have someone come out from behind a screen quickly and shoot him or her in the head. Quick, painless, and fool-proof. And you don’t need a doctor to handle the gun. Or get a tough ex-baseball slugger to walk out with a Hillerich & Bradsby Barry Bonds autograph model and barrel up the prisoner’s melon.
I would want there to be exceptions for serial killers and mad-dog murderers still young enough to cause mayhem, but those execution survivors should have their sentences commuted after a single failed execution. Remember, I say this as an unshakeable defender of capital punishment
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!
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!
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?