They could give the executioners names such as Chop-it-off Chuck or Lop-it-off López.
Beheadings seem to be quite popular at the moment. They could video them and put them on YouTube afterwards as a deterrent to others.
Sounds like an outsourcing opportunity for their dear ally Saudi Arabia.
Firing squads really do bring back the barbarity of it all. Dispatching people by lethal injection at least has some clinical semblance, but marksman shooting at a person's heart is like something out of the American Civil War.
Shame
It seems this guy in Brazil took matters in his own hands....
Pictures are not pretty though...
I don’t support the death penalty and hope this woman recovers and returns to jail. But I suspect that, given that witnesses apparently said she bragged about the murder she committed before and after, she may have been playing the “mental illness” card, e.g. (as reported in another article) likening herself to Lindsay Clancy. There must be a lot of people who experienced abuse as children who did not go on to commit murder.
I just read this thread for the first time. In answer to the original post, I think it was accepted in the UK of the 60s-70s that a direct vote might have lead to a re-introduction of the death penalty. The elected representatives were not going to allow that to happen. Personally I agree with them. Too many innocent people were hung and it is arguable that the death penalty does not work well as a deterrent.
The technicalities/diminished responsibility lawyer fodder of todays systems is a disaster. As for botched executions, is Pete in charge? Maybe the authorities in the USA need some technical help from abroad. I suspect that having a large number of prisoners on “death row” is considered a good deterrent and maybe botching executions just adds to the effect.
Being a little cynical, I’m surprised that with it being a state where there seems to be a high density of God-botherers, that they don’t see this as some kind of “divine intervention”. TWO doses of what should be a lethal injection and she’s still alive? Maybe the baby Jaysus had a hand in it?
On the other hand, it seems to be a mixture of spoiled goods and incompetence:
Pike’s legal team said in a statement to the Tennessean newspaper: "Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution.
“We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency motion to stay her execution and provide medical care after the lethal injection was apparently botched.
How many of you have had a close family member kidnapped, raped, and murdered? I’ll bet none…bring back the electric chair.
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The desire for revenge is understandable. My sister was killed forty years ago. It was not legally considered murder and the perpetrator was back on the streets within five years. Very hard on the whole family.
I didn’t want revenge…I just wanted him off the earth–he was an animal, and she was a loving, gentle, intelligent girl who would have gone on to be a doctor and given something to humanity.
Christa Pike was supposed to die in Tennesee yesterday and it was botched. Even after two attempts she was still not dead and was rushed fo hospital.
Her original request was to die by a female firing squad, but since she’s not in one of the 5 states that murders its citizens by that method, she’s had to undergo this inhumane ordeal.
Immediately looking online about the shelf life and expiration periods of pentobarbital.
One of the first results is this one:
Tennessee prison officials are refusing to confirm that they will not be using expired lethal injection drugs to execute Tony Carruthers on Thursday morning.
Medical experts say the use of out-of-date — and thus less potent — chemicals and drugs for lethal injections raises the risk of prolonged and painful death. In Tennessee, the discovery in 2022 that the state had failed to properly test lethal injection drugs led to a three-year pause in executions. An independent review found the Tennessee Department of Correction had carried out two recent executions using untested drugs and that officials were regularly scrambling to obtain them. A new one-drug protocol was released in December 2024 and Tennessee now uses the barbiturate pentobarbital in lethal injections.
So, there are concerns about expired drugs. But wait a min…that’s another guy (T. Carruthers) and the date is 19 May 2026. What happened to Mr. Carruthers? Oh, FFS!!!
In a written statement, the Tennessee Department of Corrections said medical personnel had quickly established a primary IV line but were unable to find a suitable vein for a backup line as required by the state’s execution protocol. Efforts to insert a central line also failed, and officials called off the execution.
Well, that’s a record, 2 botched executions in a row.
An interesting read. At least Pike didn’t immolate as what happened to one of this warden’s inmates:
It’s a nuanced topic I can see the argument of removing threats to society but also offering vengeance to the loved ones of the victims. Many still argue that it can only be partial restitution anyway as the State administers the penalty (at least in principle) without passion. I remember colleagues arguing that full vengeance can be achieved only imposing proportionate suffering on the offender
Killing a human being is wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right. ‘Nuff said.
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Maybe the loved ones of the victims would like to say something instead
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I think that the current US policy on execution is heavy handed. It’s a blunt instrument and should be used only as a very last resort.
And the loved ones of the person executed don’t have the same consideration?
From the Innocence Project.
In the last 30 years, exoneration cases have exposed the very real shortcomings of the American legal system.
The Innocence Project has represented innocent people who were wrongly convicted of murder and condemned to death in cases that were compromised by police and prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, eyewitness misidentification, unreliable forensic evidence, racial bias, and more. In some instances, our clients have come within days of execution. These cases powerfully establish that — notwithstanding legislative and constitutional guarantees of increased scrutiny for and oversight of such cases — the capital punishment system is deeply flawed and poses an unconscionable threat to innocent people. For these reasons, the death penalty must be abolished.
Since 1973, at least 200 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). A 2014 study estimated that at least 4% of those sentenced to death are innocent. These numbers don’t demonstrate the full scope of the impact that the death penalty has on the problem of wrongful conviction as the threat of the death penalty causes innocent people to plead guilty and induces false testimony from witnesses.
The vast majority of people exonerated from death row are Black or Latinx, and more than half of death row exonerees are Black. Studies consistently demonstrate that the race of the accused and/or race of the victim plays an arbitrary yet determinative role in the administration of the death penalty. This is significant in the context of wrongful conviction because official misconduct has been documented in three-fourths of the cases of Black exonerees and two-thirds of the cases of Latinx exonerees, while official misconduct is present in less than 60% of the cases of white exonerees.
Although the Constitution promises equal justice for all, race continues to affect every stage of a capital case from arrest and investigation to eventual execution. Most homicides are intra-racial (white people are more likely to kill white people, Black people are more likely to kill Black people, etc.), but the use of the death penalty for inter-racial crimes has always been lopsided. Nearly 300 Black people accused of murdering white people have been executed since 1976. That’s almost 17 times more than the number of white people executed for murdering Black people, the DPIC notes.
The Innocence Project currently represents people on death row with strong claims of innocence and supports coalitions working to ban the use of the death penalty. Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire became the most recent states to outlaw capital punishment, but 27 states, the federal government, and the U.S. military still allow the use of this arbitrary and brutal punishment.