Yeah? She was raped at age 11 by her neighbor and tried to kill herself at age 12. Later, child protective services removed her from her home because her mother’s boyfriend was physically and sexually abusing her.
Put her mother, mother’s boyfriend, and neighbor on death row instead. Pike never had a chance.
I can feel sorry for Pike as a victim of child sexual abuse without in any way excusing or sympathizing with her for her brutal victimization of someone else. Plenty of people go through as bad or worse abuse and don’t commit deliberate heinous murders. Pike’s still responsible for her own choices and actions.
(Which, as I said, is an entirely different issue from whether society should inflict the death penalty on heinous murderers.)
It probably isn’t true, but I once heard about a sadistic, vicious, unrepentant murderer who actually tried to claim that they had been mistreated in their tragic youth in an attempt to garner sympathy from well meaning liberal types to hopefully use public opinion and misplaced compassion to escape the brutal (and doubtless racist, transphobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, and lycanthrophobic) justice that they had been so uncaringky served with.
A few years back, poor, sweet Christa Pike once savagely beat a fellow prison inmate so brutally that the woman permanently lost sight in one eye, and suffered irreversible neurologic damage, but that was likely just a one-time situation.
(OK, technically a two time situation, if you somehow count the teenage girl she butchered)
I should have stated that "It probably isn’t true because people that savagely torture, brutalize and gleefully butcher teenage girls are widely recognized as faunts of truth, unfettered candor and straight talk."
In England in 1895 three attempts wer made to hang convicted murderer John “Babbacombe” Lee.
On each occasion the trap jammed. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment
Isn’t there even a folk song of that name?
ETA: I misremembered, there’s even a whole concept album about the guy by the British folk rock band Fairport Convention.
I don’t understand this. If she hadn’t been taken to hospital she would have died which was the whole point of the exercise.
If she is nursed back to good health will they make a third attempt to execute her?
Sideways thought. She has been in prison for thirty years before the attempted execution. In UK we either hung murderers (prior to 1965) or, now, sentence them to a long term of imprisonment.
In the USA you apply both punishments
If someone is not healthy enough to be executed, they delay the execution until a later date. But this situation is not exactly like that. There’s not a standard procedure for a case like this. What happens will likely be decided by lawyers and judges. I might guess the governor would commute her sentence from execution to life in prison.
Exactly.
You realize that this is sort of a silly statement (this isn’t a dig at you: I know you’re just reporting reality). If you’re going to KILL someone, why does their health in the hour or so beforehand matter? I suspect the answer is that it’s only humane to kill healthy people, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around that.
The culture around the American death penalty is truly strange.
There’s also the notion of a “suicide watch” in the hours leading up to an execution. We wouldn’t want the condemned to have control over the end of their life, would we? The common phrase is “cheating the hangman”.
I think the issue here is that if you’re not competent enough to understand what is happening and why it’s happening they can’t kill you.
I don’t know if it’s ironic or not, but it’s possible the botched execution left her brain damaged enough to make another attempt impossible.
Even if you were able to understand 20 years ago when the sentence was read?
My understanding is yes, if you could understand at sentencing but became mentally incompetent during your subsequent incarceration they have to make you sane to kill you.
So after 30 years on death row, she spends the next 30 as a vegetable.
botch-22
Has anyone mentioned that Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada has just resigned?
I believe that while many, many people truly deserve to be put to death (not necessarily Christa, but certainly many others), it’s not something the State should have the power to do to its citizens. And not because of the vast room for error, although that’s also huge.
This reminds me of that infamous comment made during the Vietnam War but in reverse:
“It became necessary to save the inmate in order to kill her.”
I admit that I actually do think treason and insurrection might warrant the death penalty. In particular, I believe our country would be better off today if we hadn’t somehow managed to execute more frightened young men and boys for desertion during the Civil War than we did confederate traitors for treason after.
Although I suppose I’d be okay with life sentences, had those sentences actually been imposed and carried out. As opposed to the, you know, nothing that the ring leaders got.
Did y’all know George Pickett hanged a bunch of loyal union men (POWs), and yet got off scot free himself?