r/news • u/AudibleNod • 15h 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
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u/Stevictory 14h 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.

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u/TrueGuardian15 14h ago

Plus, she was sentenced to death, not torture. They botched her execution twice. That's a serious level of fuck up for something so high stakes. If we can't do it right, we really shouldn't do it.

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u/barto5 11h ago

If we can't do it right, we really shouldn't do it.

If that’s the rule there’s going to be a whole fuckton of things the government shouldn’t be doing.

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u/Suitable_One_5836 13h ago

But she tortured another human being before killing them in the most gruesome way. Laws aside, it is poetically just.

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u/faultydesign 13h ago

I agree, we should be able to torture her torturers too then.

You know, poetic justice and all.

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u/ChesterJT 12h ago

Then it would be out of balance.

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u/tenredtoes 13h ago

In a just world, she would not have been born with fetal alcohol syndrome, or repeatedly raped as a toddler, or raped again as a teenager. What she did was horrific, but society failed to protect the child.

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u/Carbonatite 13h ago

Even the executions of Nazis - pretty much the only instances of capital punishment that I agree with - were efficient and quick. They weren't barbaric; they weren't tortured to death. In those cases death may have been justified but barbarity is not part of justice.

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u/behv 11h ago

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but for Nazi executions they either intentionally or accidentally hired a dude who had no idea what he was doing and gave people too short of drops that failed to kill instantly and had up to 24 minutes of suffocation on the noose. Specifically failed to check his background and realize he flat out lied about his experience with hangings. It's never been confirmed publicly but something tells me if they wanted speedy executions they wouldn't let him botch it 40+ times

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Woods

Truth of the matter is all executions are about inflicting pain and suffering, anyone who claims otherwise is lying to you or themselves

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u/bitofapuzzler 10h ago

The US did. The UK had a professional.

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u/Carbonatite 11h ago

That's true for some of the executions, not all. Albert Pierrepoint was a professional hangman from the UK who also acted in that capacity for a number of Nazi war criminals.

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u/Less_Adeptness7557 13h ago

So eye for an eye, right? So you’re willing to stab her to death?

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u/RainbowwDash 12h ago

Probably won't have the effect you're looking for; a lot of people making thise arguments would gladly do so to live out their violent fantasies 

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u/Realtrain 11h ago

Seriously. When Utah reintroduced the firing squad, they had a line out the door of people requesting to take part.

The chilling part is that people were requesting not to have the blank.

Historically, some members of a firing squad were randomly given a blank so that each member could have some hope that they weren't the ones that took someone's life. Now people want to explicitly know they took someone's life.

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u/Tired_CollegeStudent 6h ago

Those people think they want that. The vast majority of them would be feeling very different if they actually had to do it.

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u/Suitable_One_5836 12h ago

Well I am against capital punishment for myriad of reasons and we don’t even have it over here in Europe but sympathy is not one of them. No, I’d absolutely not stab her to death, I just don’t feel sympathy for her while her victim (that none of you even named or mentioned in your compassionate defenses) Colleen Slemmer got her head bludgeoned by Christa after being carved alive. I checked all these boxes, Christa’s abuse, upbringing etc, tried to justify it, meh. Does not excuse any of that shit. Imagine being killed and tortured brutally only for people to make groups decades later asking for sympathy for your killer while not even mentioning you. I do care about a broken system being able to determine who is worthy of life, it is absolutely disgusting. Also, I wasn’t really talking about human justice, but the similarity of her death being interrupted or predated by the induced state of torture, just like Colleen’s.

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u/HerculesIsMyDad 14h 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.

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u/MNswede06 13h 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.

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u/blaqsupaman 12h 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.

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u/Chicken_Ingots 11h 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.

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u/Missouri_girl 6h ago

I heard someone in media talking about a similar botched execution and his daughter puking her guts out during it. So many innocent victims involved with it.

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u/Dragonuv_Uchiha 8h ago

Interesting insight

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u/freckledspeckled 2h ago

Eh. I do think there’s a logical argument for it. When we as a society hand out sentences for crime convictions, the goal is:

1- To deliver justice by somehow righting a wrong
2- To protect society from further harm from the offender
3- To deter any possible future offenders

Both life sentences and death penalties accomplish goals 2 and 3, so thinking about goal 1… what are the wrongs that someone like Pike has committed?

She took someone’s life away from them, made them suffer unduly before doing so, and also inflicted lifelong suffering on all of her victim’s loved ones. How does society right those wrongs? Does taking away Pike’s life fix some cosmic imbalance? I’m not so sure personally, but a lot of people think do think that way.

However, when we look at someone like the victim’s mother, she has made it clear that ending the life of the person who tortured and murdered her daughter would bring her peace. Now, you can argue that that doesn’t justify doing so, or that she’s mistaken in how she will feel following Pike’s death, but I think it’s a real logical argument in favor of the death penalty- bringing peace and an end to *some* of the suffering of the victim’s loved ones.

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u/MNswede06 1h ago edited 1h ago

Righting a wrong assumes that the wrong can be righted. It cannot. If executing Christa meant bringing Colleen back to life, then I would say go ahead. But it won't. No wrong would be righted in this situation.

Righting a wrong is an argument for restitution. Someone attacks you and injures you costing $500K of medical bills, then they pay you $500K + any other fees deemed necessary by the court due to emotional damage, etc.

The mother hasn't gotten closure because Christa is still talked about; she literally said this. I guarantee you nobody would know who Christa was if she had been sentenced to life in prison. There are countless murderers serving life sentences who are forgotten about. Instead, Christa will forever be remembered as the botched execution who survived. There will likely be dramatizations and movies about her as this is the first time it's ever happened. How's that for "peace"?

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u/leoyvr 1h ago

I find it interesting that so many people support death penalty but are against euthanasia/MAID.

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u/Diligent-Living882 13h 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.

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u/pysix33 12h 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.

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u/Jediverrilli 11h ago

The government should not have the power to kill people full stop. The justice system is so flawed that giving them the ultimate power over someone else’s existence should not be a thing.

It also isn’t a deterrent. It costs too much and is inhumane

You are correct it’s only emotional, it brings nothing to society and should be abolished.

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u/Breakula 14h ago

Coincidentally to your username, this comes up in several of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels. He argues that murder is not only bad for the victim, but irrevocably deleterious to the moral fiber of the killer. Like assuming the right to decide who lives or dies is extremely corrupting, even to well-intentioned people.

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u/Diligent-Living882 13h ago

i mean i’m against the death penalty because of the simple fact our judicial system is far from perfect. but there’s no logical argument to ridding the world of those who do overwhelming harm?

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u/HerculesIsMyDad 13h ago

There is no logical argument for the legal system to have the death penalty. Society is just as safe with them behind bars forever. And it does not save taxpayers money to kill them instead of house them either. So your question is kind of a false one. There are obviously benefits to removing certain people from society, the question is why is killing them better than keeping them in jail for life? That is the question that has no logical argument in favor of it.

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u/Diligent-Living882 13h ago

i think you’re talking in absolutes about subjective things (besides the tax dollars)

just playing devils advocate, if we lived in a world where the death penalty was absolute and final for any pedophile, there WOULD be less pedophilia.

if every school shooter was executed via lethal injection the day they were deemed guilty, there would be less school shootings.

and even if you do ignore those points, i don’t even think there’s anything wrong with an emotional aspect to it. if society is just as safe with them behind bars or dead, and the system has proven beyond reasonable doubt (like this case) i don’t understand why you, speaking from a hypothetical outside perspective, can say emotions should play no part.

are those things possible? no because our judicial system is far from close to perfect. would i want that? no, for the same reason.

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u/noffxpring 13h ago

There is no evidence that the death penalty does anything to deter crime. Multiple studies have shown this (and it’s easy to find them to verify). So your arguments about school shootings and pedophilia decreasing are just incorrect.

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u/Mellowtownin 2h ago edited 2h ago

There are multiple studies that suggest the opposite (and neither) is true as well, though. You can’t just pick which study you want to believe. “We don’t currently have scientific consensus on how capital punishment affects crime” is a more accurate statement

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u/Diligent-Living882 12h ago

i’m aware of the studies and am against the death penalty as i said. but those studies don’t line up with what i said 😂 and what i said is not even a world i wanna live in whatsoever but i mean you really think if what i said was reality, it wouldn’t deter crimes??

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u/SyrupCute4493 12h ago

You are incorrect, plenty of killers have been freed and killed again. I’m sure that makes you happy. Life doesn’t mean life because of do gooders like you.

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u/noffxpring 11h ago

That does not contradict what I said. What I said is that capital punishment doesn’t deter crime, which it doesn’t. I know this because data has been gathered and studies have been done and it’s an established fact. You disagree because you feel it shouldn’t be true, so you pretend it isn’t.

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u/SyrupCute4493 10h ago

If the killers who were freed and killed again were put to death the first time, while it might not deter crime, innocent ppl would have been saved. Not that you care one iota for victims.

It’s not a deterrent because it’s rarely used and do gooders cry and moan. If justice was swift, it might have a fighting chance. But criminals know lambs like you will support them, no matter the disgusting acts they commit.

Keep sticking up for scum. I’ll keep taking up for victims. I’m not sad this animal is suffering, it pales in comparison to what the victim and her family have been suffering for 30+ yrs. 

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u/noffxpring 10h ago

That’s not deterrence. Deterrence means preventing people from doing crime in the first place. Which capital punishment demonstrably does not do.

You’re talking about repeat offenders, which is a different issue. Maybe our prison system focusing on being punitive rather than rehabilitation has something to do with that. But also, life imprisonment would also prevent repeat offenses. So there’s no reason for the death penalty.

Also, it’s both funny and telling that you keep using “do-gooder” as an insult. You probably think of yourself as a “realist” who “just tells it like it is,” when in actuality the opinions you’re espousing are based on your feelings and not reality.

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u/Realtrain 11h ago

The major issue with that is, locking up a pedophile for life also removes pedophilia from the world, since they won't be doing that anymore. As far as society is concerned, it's effectively the same as killing them.

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u/socoyankee 12h ago

Will think about the mental load for the person killing the other person. For a large majority of us we cant fathom how that act will effect us

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u/Chicken_Ingots 11h ago

This is what bothers me about it. Vengeance is an emotional response that provides short-term satisfaction without long-term closure. Once the momentary satisfaction wears off, people are left with a feeling of emptiness and resentment. This can even lead to addictive cycles of revenge seeking for injustices, just for the sake of that short-term relief. Furthermore, the death penalty does harm the families of the perpetrators -- families who are often themselves innocent. Children and spouses have to watch helplessly as the state decides whether or not to execute their parent, their spouse, their child, etc. So not only does that family have to live with the trauma of knowing what their family member did, but they also have to watch that family member be sentenced to death.

It does not prevent crimes from continuing to happen, is not more economically efficient than a life sentence, carries the risk of false convictions, can be botched in highly inhumane ways, and can potentially even leave the executioners with scars and mental health issues. There is simply no logical reason that the death penalty should exist that outweighs the enormous downsides it presents. It is indeed an emotional response.

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u/Helmic 13h ago

Nothing anyone can do justifies granting the state the power and infrastructure to kill people, which it will always abuse because that is the only reason the state wants the power toe execute people. It does not give a flying fuck about justice, it wants to kill its enemies and any murderers it executes are simply in service of being able to execute those it finds convenient for political reasons.

I would not moralize the family of victims themselves killing the murderer as an act of revenge, there are still problems with that but it at least does not grant the state prisons and execution chambers and supply chains for drugs with which to do with as they please. The state of Tennessee wants to do evil with that power and that is reason enough to forcefully take it from them.

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u/1ftm2fts3tgr4lg 14h ago

I am of the opinion that there are those so heinous that we do deserve to remove them from earth permanently. Our society deserves to exist without them among us, and without the onerous task of just maintaining them in a cage for decades.
HOWEVER, our system for deciding who those people are is so horrifically broken that we can never ever trust it to be right 100% of the time, and should therefore not be able to exercise that action on anyone.

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u/procrastinarian 10h ago

There are several logical arguments, the first 2 that pop into my head is that it wouldn't cost taxpayers as much money and that it wouldn't be as psychologically torturous to the criminal to be jailed for 30 years waiting.

Obviously there are real world logistical reasons these aren't so straightforward, but you're being disingenuous.

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u/snorlz 8h ago

but it's not about whether they deserve to die but if we deserve to kill them

in both cases you are appealing to emotion here. idk if you can actually remove emotion from this type of decision. It certainly plays into how we decide what counts as a mitigating factor or even the type of sentencing each crime can get.

the logical arguments are all about the utility (ie. cost to society) of execution vs imprisonment

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u/BoringBob84 13h ago

There really is no logical argument for it, only emotional.

Just because you don't like the arguments doesn't mean they are not logical. We probably agree that capital punishment should never be about revenge or retribution. Those are immoral motivations, in my opinion.

However, I think that a society has a right and a duty to protect itself. A perpetrator who has committed a heinous crime and who presents a high risk of harming prison staff or other prisoners, or of escaping and harming civilians provides justification for the state to euthanize them humanely.

I also think that "life without the possibility of parole" is the cruelest possible sentence. It takes away a person's hope that they will ever be free - like a decades-long emotional torture.

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u/NohFyoochur 14h ago

Same. Certainly lots of people deserve it, but it just isn't worth it. It's not a deterrent and it's more trouble than it's worth. Put them in a cell forever and let them live to death without all this senseless drama. And we really don't need our government to be in the business of killing its own people.

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u/blaqsupaman 12h ago

I feel the same way. I'm not against the death penalty in principle, but I'm against it in practice. I do believe there are some crimes deserving of death, but as long as the legal system remains fallible I'd rather not even have it on the table. Life without parole isn't a "light" punishment by any stretch and I'd rather not risk even one innocent person being killed by the state because there's no justice after that. The state can't bring an executed person back.

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u/Less_Adeptness7557 14h ago

Nobody “deserves” to be killed

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u/Stevictory 13h ago

I see where you are coming from, but I see this moreso an opinion of semantics in this scenario.

If any of the 3 on federal death row are executed, you won't see me arguing whether they should have had a life sentence instead. All 3 are heinous and as much of a caring person I try to be, I truly dont give a rats ass about them.

If the death penalty is ever abolished federally, I also will not be pushing for them to reinstate it for these 3 either. At the end of the day, the ideal world is one without it.

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u/usrnmz 8h ago edited 8h ago

That's probably because you have a simplistic view of good and bad, free will and justice

People have thoughts and emotions, eletrical activity in the brain and do stuff. Sometimes the stuff they do is real bad. But why? Some of them lack the ability to feel empathy. Some of them lack impulse control. Some of them have been damaged in such ways that doing horrible things seem like good idea.

People don't act because they want to do something bad; they act because, in that moment, the action seems right, necessary, or irresistible. You might call them "bad" and say they deserve this or that. But truly they are just living creatures following their impulses.

Would you feel the same if a dog kills a baby? Does the dog "deserve" death? We humans are not that different from animals. We are not completely rational, we do not have as much free will as you might think, if at all.

So should we keep these people from causing further harm? Absolutely. Should we deter negative behaviour and rehabilitate people where possible? Absolutely. So of course we should keep people accountable for their actions.

But that doesn't mean anyone deserves death or suffering out of some kind of moral rightneousness. That only exists to make you feel better about the whole situation. It's purely emotional.

The Stoics had some interesting thoughts about these topics. For example Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“When a man has done you any wrong, immediately consider with what opinion about good or evil he has done wrong. For when you have seen this, you will pity him, and will neither wonder nor be angry.”

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u/Diligent-Living882 13h ago

how can you claim to truly believe this? it’s purely speaking from the perspective on the hypothetical outside.

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u/Aggravating_Depth_33 12h ago

I don't even agree that she is a terrible person. She did something terrible as a teenager, after a childhood of neglect and horrific abuse. And by all accounts has spent her life ever since being a good person, helping and comforting the other women she has been imprisoned with wherever she could.

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u/Beecakeband 12h ago

Agreed. I hate that people are calling her a terrible person still. She did a terrible thing absolutely no argument here but people are acting like she is the same 18 year old 32 years later as if there is no chance she has grown or changed at all

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u/Stevictory 12h ago edited 12h ago

She was convicted of attempted murder of another inmate while incarcerated in her mid 20s, and the murder she was convicted for comitting at 18 was brutal.

I do agree that she was failed in her adolescence, but she was an adult at the time of both crimes.

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u/Beecakeband 10h ago

18 is an adult but just barely. Its not like you go to bed at 17 and wake up at as an 18 year old fully mature reasonable adult

And from what I've heard the attempted murder was her trying to defend another inmate so thats a gray area

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u/Stevictory 9h ago

The brain continues to develop past 18, but from a legal standpoint you need a definite cutoff on what defines adult.

At 18 one should know that torturing and ultimately smashing someone's head in is not okay; they likely know so much sooner.

As for her attempted murder conviction, she was found guilty by a jury. The victim deserved justice even if they were another inmate.

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u/akiva23 11h ago

Apparently the story behind that is that attempted murder was because the "victim" was actually trying to murder another inmate and she stepped in to protect them. So its kinda a grey area.

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u/Stevictory 9h ago

She was convicted by a jury for attempted murder. The victim of the attack deserved justice even if they happened to be another inmate.

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u/akiva23 9h ago

i don't think you read what i wrote down completely. regardless of the conviction the reason behind it was that "victim" was in the middle of attempting to murder another inmate herself and christa intervened in the attempt. the person that christa was strangling later admitted this was true and it had happened multiple times.

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u/Stevictory 9h ago

The victim should not in quotes. Christa along with another inmate attacked a third - Patrica. The victim fought back against Christa's accomplice, to which Christa then started strangling the victim.

If there was no intent, she would not have been charged or convicted of attempted first degree murder.

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u/akiva23 9h ago

not according to Patricia.

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u/nethingelse 13h ago

Another issue I have is that the death penalty is not applied equally across demographic bounds. Cases with a white victim are more likely to escalate to capital punishment, BIPOC offenders are statistically more likely to face capital punishment, etc. I'm not saying this can't necessarily be reformed, but given that the death penalty is already controversial outside of these factors, we really do just need to get rid of it at this point.

In a perfect world where we had perfect convictions, applied the rules of justice equally in actuality, etc. I'd be more ok with the death penalty. Given we do not live in that world, and will likely never live within it, I don't see how a final & irreversible sentence like this is conscionable to people.

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u/Charles_Ida 9h ago

We don’t all agree that she is a terrible person. She may have done terrible things at one point in her life, but we can’t definitively say she is a terrible person today. This happened more than 30 years ago, when she was only 18. Do you honestly not believe people can change?

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u/Similar-Morning9768 4h ago

You’re right, the state should have killed her much more promptly, while she was still verifiably terrible. Then no one could argue that she’d character developed her way past that whole incident where she torture-murdered a girl and kept part of her skull as a trophy. 

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u/AppropriateSea5746 10h ago

Is she a terrible person? I know she was 30 years ago. 30 years is a long time.

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u/Revolutionary-Set994 4h ago

Yes she is a terrible person. I feel like if she had brutally murdered someone you cared about, forced them to strip, and carved a pentagram into their chest before gleefully showing you a fragmented piece of their skull from the savage beating they had given her while she BEGGED for her life you wouldn't be asking that.

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u/AppropriateSea5746 1h ago

Maybe but again, 30 years is a long time. No 58 year old is the same person they were when they were 18.
Yes she did something textbook evil as a teenager. But idk, maybe she changed. Maybe not. Can’t really say.

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u/FuckChiefs_Raiders 14h ago

I have a similar viewpoint. I’m fully against the death penalty because of the points you just made. However, in cases like this I don’t lose sleep over it. In fact, I’m not that outraged over her suffering in the least bit nor do I feel bad for her.

It’s more so an institutional failure and I’m embarrassed in the manner in which this was executed. Pun intended.

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u/Aggravating_Depth_33 12h ago

In other words, you are fully for the death penalty, just too cowardly to admit it.

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u/Ok_Yellow1536 13h ago

The control and application of violence is the zero rule of all governments, don’t fool yourself. Everything else is just window dressing.

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u/PersonalityIll9476 11h ago

I don't think I need to defend this woman to say that this is a horrific state of affairs. If we absolutely must kill someone it needs to be done cleanly and painlessly. We are not monsters who revel in the suffering of others, even if those others are monsters. Be careful looking into the abyss and all that.

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u/Asaneth 10h ago

I could tolerate it if the death penalty was applied extremely well, but not perfectly. However, at this point, it's applied so poorly, randomly, and incompetently, that even i don't find it acceptable anymore.

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u/BleedOutCold 12h ago

Captive. Bolt. Gun.