So my thinking here is this: she was sentenced to death, she received her punishment (failed execution), sentence can be considered complete?

I dont know much about US/Tennessee law but it would seem that she is in uncharted territory - having survived execution - and is a bit of a headache for the legal system? Are there any other cases like this and what happened?

My thinking is very liberal/European (I dont support capital punishment anyway) but providing she is no longer a risk to society - just release her. If it can be proved she is a risk, transfer her to a low security prison?

FYI: Christa Pike

I think in medieval times, if something went wrong with the execution, it was chalked up to God saving the person and they were set free; also a nice way for the King to pardon someone without political consequences.

I don't think that's how it works here, though maybe living with the expectation of a cruel and unusual punishment is itself a cruel and unusual punishment and she should get commuted to life in prison.

She should be worshiped as the 2ND coming. She arose from death days later.

Anyone wanna join Pikeism?

At least this religion is new enough to verify facts.

IMO she hasn't yet served her sentence.

No, she still tortured and killed a teenage girl.

I think they should commute her sentence to life, though.

She didn't just take a life, she deliberately and cruelly took a life; it was planned and she wanted to make it hurt. This isn't someone you want to let back on the streets.

The question is: would YOU take her in and let her stay with YOUR kids? I think most people would not.

Maybe even if Yes she should at least be on house arrest just to protect other People

Should not be let out. You've linked the wikipedia page, it should say right there what she was convicted for doing.

Try again or life in prison is the debate I think you could have.

I read the Wikipedia article and I have a vague recolection of a thread here where the woman early years and life was described and this is a seriously abused individual.

Did she nonetheless took part in a heinous murder? Yes.

Is capital punishment a fitting sentence? No.

And I don't care whatever reasoning is put here; capital punishment is not a sentence to be delivered. Someone needs to become a killer to execute another and someone needs to deal with that notion to the end of their life.

If the woman is deemed dangerous to be set in society, commit her to an insane asylum. Give her a garden to tend, use her life and behaviour as a case study, learn something from it, cremate her corpse and spread her ashes after she dies of old age so no cult can sprout from her grave site.

And commit the entire case for the history books.

There’s a a difference between what is morally right/wrong and there’s what the law says.

I think in the eyes of the law she could argue her sentence has been served. She has experienced the death penalty. Twice.

She has never experienced the death penalty because she never died.

The governor should commute her sentence to life in prison. He's fucked up so many times and still won't learn. To let the multi-time botching executions prison commissioner resign instead of firing him... coward. I hope the Tennessee voters remove this idiot at their earliest opportunity. Please, please, please prove me wrong and show this is enough to break through the MAGA cult.

You can compare this with a couple instances where felons serving life sentences had to be resuscitated and then went on to appeal that since they had temporarily died they had fulfilled the terms of their 'life' sentence. Benjamin Shcreiber and Jerry Rosenberg are notable examples if you want to read more.

In at least one story I've heard, a judge has dismissed an appeal on similar grounds because "if the defendant has served their life sentence, then they must be deceased, and the deceased are unable to file appeal."

Basically they argued over the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit. That kind of thing only works if you're a billionaire, and the rest of us schmucks have to accept that the spirit of a life sentence is that you are removed from society until you're dead for good (or granted clemency or whatever).

I'm against capital punishment, but the spirit of the law is that Christa Pike is to be permanently removed from society and given her case history that's something I agree with. But even if you want to argue the letter of the law: she was sentenced to execution and if the state failed to execute her, that means she hasn't been executed.

I'm not a lawyer, but to my understanding the only legitimate avenue to appeal she has, and it's still a stretch, would be on the grounds of her botched execution being a "cruel and unusual punishment." However, if released today she'd have to go through life in the USA - which is also cruel and unusual

I don’t think you would have that opinion if you read the linked Wikipedia article. What she did was beyond horrific. She should remain separated from society for life for what she did to that girl.

If I've learned anything, this is the beginning of a horror movie, not the end.

I heard a story once from the midevil times where they changed the law from "hanged" to "hanged until death" cause they had to let someone off after a botched hanging.

Not too much precedent since then though cause most civilised countries have since banned state murder.

Pike spent her prison time in solitary confinement

Absolute torture.

Warning, hard questions ahead, but, don't worry, I'm sure you can find easy answers.

You might as well just stop reading, and downvote me now.

These are the cases that test the limits of human empathy and compassion.

When we imagine that "there are some people who can't be rehabilitated", how certain are we? In this case, did anyone even try? Who decides when we give up, are the people deciding this fully qualified to do so? Is it a judge listening to a single "expert witness" psychologist? Is it the prison warden deciding? Should more people be consulted, are we ignoring possible solutions out of convenience, or even anger and bloodlust?

Are you qualified to decide? Do you know what's possible? I don't. Did you read what she did and say, "she's not worth the effort, she can't be helped, the only thing to do is lock her away"? Is that your expert opinion? Maybe you learned it from a movie?

Everyone wants simple answers and the simple answer is to say that this person, because of what she did, deserves death, or at least to be locked away for life, out of sight, out of mind. Allow the brutal prison system to do whatever it wants. The experts must know what they're doing. Why even try with this one?

I think "that's the best we can do", only because no one has tried harder.

Have we tried absolutely everything, can we think of nothing more? What could be learned from more concerted effort?

These are the cases that test us and I think we give up out of disgust, hatred, and convenience. Not to mention money in our for-profit prison system.

This isn't an Uwe Boll movie though.

I love how you went on a rant and completely missed the bit where I said release her if she's not a threat to society.

In most western countries - even in the case of murder - once someone's sentence is up they are released. The caveat being that if that person is deamed to be a threat then alternative arrangements are made. And, threat is measured by professionals (psychiatrists, social workers, etc).

If Christa was still considered a threat then obviously, I wouldn't support her release.

While being a stupid kid herself. She is not the same person anymore and I believe she deserves to be set free

From what I heard there is already language that explains exactly what to do and that is if it fails then the fallback is electric chair. Of course her lawyers will fight it for the next 20 years, and even crazier if somehow they win. My guess is she dies naturally in jail before whatever next attempt gets finalized and I am ok with that.

So my opinion is, no she should not be freed and just be kept in jail for the remainder of her life.

The governor should commute her sentence to life in prison.

Probably the most likely outcome.

please prove me wrong and show this is enough to break through the MAGA cult.

Ideally there would be a debate about capital punishment or more humane/effective methods of execution. Unlikely to happen though, MAGA morality will probably lead to the default being death by firing squad. Live and televised.

she still tortured and killed a teenage girl

Yes, and she's served her time.

She didn't just take a life, she deliberately and cruelly took a life; it was planned and she wanted to make it hurt.

But you can't automatically assume that she's beyond rehabilitation.

This isn't someone you want to let back on the streets.

Is that your knee-jerk opinion or that of trained professionals?

would YOU take her in and let her stay with YOUR kids?

Of course not. Do you let random strangers into your home and around your kids?

I think most people would not.

Well you'd hope so. But as long as it could be proven she didn't pose a risk to the general public I'd be fine with her being released.

You can compare this with a couple instances where felons serving life sentences had to be resuscitated and then went on to appeal that since they had temporarily died they had fulfilled the terms of their 'life' sentence.

Ahh. Didn't realise there was presidence.

if the defendant has served their life sentence, then they must be deceased, and the deceased are unable to file appeal

I can see the logic there. It is the 'death penalty' after all.

That kind of thing only works if you're a billionaire

Yep. Effectiveness of representation is determined by how much you're willing/able to spend.

No. Her conviction was not invalidated by a botched execution attempt. There are no legal avenues through which release is an option.

She was sentenced to death, she received her punishment

Incorrect. A death warrant calls for a completed execution resulting in death, not for a finite number of attempts. She only receives her punishment if she dies.

Is capital punishment a fitting sentence? No.

I'd argue its a rubbish sentence because there's no room for the perpetrator to reflect on their crimes and allow themselves to be rehabilitated.

If death is the outcome then they might as well carry on being a terrible person until the executioner flips the switch.

america is plagued by vengeance, this is how these situations happen here in the first place

Anyone wanna join Pikeism?

That wasn't where I was going with this. I'm not saying release her because she's the messiah - I meant can the sentence be considered "served".

If she has been recussitated then id say yes she has.

Somewhere a dystopian sci-fi describes a justice system where you can receive multiple life sentences and actually serve them all. Upon a natural death, you are revived and renewed to the age you were at sentencing to serve the next life sentence. Only after completing them all are you free to die and remain that way.

The rich and powerful use their sway to prolong the sentences of those that have wronged them. Died early from an aggressive cancer? Well upon renewal they bribed the system to cure you of that. Or they implant a disease that won't kill you sooner but makes your time even worse.

Somewhere a dystopian sci-fi describes a justice system where you can receive multiple life sentences and actually serve them all. Upon a natural death, you are revived and renewed to the age you were at sentencing to serve the next life sentence. Only after completing them all are you free to die and remain that way.

That somewhere is a Black Mirror episode.

Yes, thank you. Someone with a grasp on how punishment for the sake of it works. Or not.

Holy crap. Good thing I didn't meet her back in those days, oblivious to what she was capable of. I'd ask her out in a heartbeat:

But yeah. I'm against capital punishment. I'm against societal vengeance. If the victim's loved ones want to beat the crap out of the murderer, I wouldn't stop them. But to act like you (any criminal justice system) can weigh, quantify, rationalize a person's acts against their right to live? Nope.

Okay, no no no.

I'm going to illustrate something here, and I hope it makes sense. Please humor me:

Hypothetically, imagine a father, and he has a beautiful daughter. Now, as difficult as it is, just imagine that she's kidnapped and brutally murdered, and he KNOWS who did it. The only ones in the whole world who knew it were the child's father and the police. But for some reason, the (hypothetical) police didn't do anything. The killer would remain free.

No matter what we think about such a situation, I think most people could sympathize with the father, and if the father decided to get revenge, people would at least understand it, maybe even find the father not guilty if he were ever put on trial. A father's love for his child, and what had been done would justify his feelings. Understandable.

But in this hypothetical scenario, it wouldn't mean that just anyone would be justified for wanting to kill the murderer, if they didn't know the killer was a murderer. If someone just happened to kill the child's murderer for no reason and had no idea that the child's murderer had killed her, no one would say that this second killer had standing to justify killing that person.

To come back to the Christa Pike case, the death penalty can be debated, and there are honestly reasonable arguments on both sides of that case.

But failed executions are unacceptable. In any context. There should NEVER be a situation where the government takes an action to kill someone and fails to do it. The result of such a thing is INHERENTLY cruel and unusual punishment. It maims people, tortures them, et cetera. The fact that this could happen to someone who is a killer means it could happen to other people. And we know for a fact that innocent people have been put to death before, so a government that would have a failed execution and would still want to kill the person is a government that has announced that a failed execution is an option for that government. That it has the ability to commit that kind of cruel and unusual punishment against someone and then to do it again.

Government justifies its continued existence through the ethics of its actions. When someone has committed murder, it's at least understandable that a given government would want to end the life of the murderer. Whether you or I or anyone else like the death penalty, it at least makes sense to want that.

The problem is that when that government fails to execute someone, the government itself is failing its first test. The test which justifies the government getting to continue to be government. At the point that a government is committing cruel and unusual punishment, for some reason, I lose interest in the question of whether a single convicted murderer deserves to die(and personally, I believe that answer is yes), but I become a whole lot more interested in why a government which has announced its intentions to have cruel and unusual punishment is now the one to ask questions about whether others should be punished in this way.

I have trouble focusing on whether a government should kill a given criminal when the government asking the question has the power to kill that person but itself lacks the ethical justification to be the one asking to do so.

I'm still cooking on it a bit. In the US, there is a concept of "judgement-proof" people in terms of civil litigation. If you have no assets or money, a civil suit can't really get anything out of you. In this dystopian universe there could be "life sentence-proof" people. You get a terminal diagnosis with only like a 1 year prognosis. What's to stop someone like that from going on a murder spree of retribution? If they survive the trial, they might only live a month of the sentence. 100 life sentences turns out to be under 9 years if those last a month on average. And there could be additional shenanigans with the rich trying to cure that ailment when a known terminal disease was present at sentencing.

Does the teenage girl she killed get to come back to life? Or is she still dead?

So you wouldn't let her stay with you, but you'd release her into a community with other people you don't have to answer to and aren't responsible for.

I'm not sure anyone is or isn't beyond rehabilitation. I'd leave that to professionals.

I wouldn't trust her around my people, so I wouldn't impose her upon yours (or someone else's). That's all. I'm professional nothing other than Internet commentator, more or less same as I assume you are.

I’m honestly surprised they didn’t do something awful without a court order stopping them.

Don’t know. I’d err on the side of caution since the PIC creates animals instead of reforming citizens.

Ideally, there’d be no state sanctioned killings, and prisons would be rehabilitative. Like, I’m sad that the question could even be asked.

Also, she isn’t getting out. There is precedence for the SC to say her death sentence wasn’t carried out. I expect them to keep trying to kill her.

Dude. By all means debate and have your own hot takes, but at least read and digest what other people are saying.

If she is alive, then she has not yet served her sentence.

fallback is electric chair

For real? Prisons still have them?

I dont know much about US/Tennessee law but it would seem that she is in uncharted territory - having survived execution

I don't know their law either, but Usa has had failed executions before.

unfortunately we don't have any facilities to be fair to anyone convicted of crime that would be appropriated and we lack the public healthcare but in a sane society. She would be put in a hospital and get care till she was well enough to be moved to psychiatric facility.

No. She fucking mutdered someone. Ffs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Tennessee

For real... says for convictions before 1999, and if that is not an option they will continue to find something else. I am assuming the lawyers will fight that this does not apply to attempted executions but problems that came before it. If watching southern states and their absolute disgusting behavior towards death row inmates even with cases proving their innocense I highly doubt what happened here will ultimately change the final outcome.

I kinda think of this as what would the sentence have looked like somewhere else?

I'm guessing something like life with 25 years non-parole. So after 30 years in prison so far, she should probably be allowed parole if she meets the normal requirements.

The question is: would YOU take her in and let her stay with YOUR kids?

That is decidedly not the question actually.

Didn't realise there was presidence.

For future reference, it's precedent.

Ctx for people who haven't read the article: she was 18 when she tortured and killed a 19yo girl with her boyfriend. They were legally adults (in most jurisdictions) and she was a similar age to the victim. Saying she "killed and tortured a teenager" is intentionally loaded language.

I choose to believe that rehabilitation is possible for every person, no matter the original circumstances. Ideally, everyone should be given the chance to live as freely as possible. Obviously, there has to be a process, there has to be some accountability and safety; but I don't think precluding that as an option categorically at the moment of sentencing is right or just.

I can't speak to her state of mind or risk to society specifically, but that's the position I hold in general.

However, with what I know of the American "justice" system and how capitalist societies are structured and how they treat people with criminal records: I doubt that is the case for many long-term inmates... The situation is regrettable, but the existing 'correctional' institutions in America appear to create more problems than they solve. But ideally, yes; if she had been rehabiliated, she should be slowly reintroduced into society.

However however, with all that said... The argument that "she was sentenced to be executed and the execution was botched, therefore she should be let go" is a bad argument.

No. Commute her death sentence.

Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man has always stuck with me.

Without getting too spoilery, "demolition" is the punishment for heinous crimes. It is indeed a terribly serious punishment, but also leaves the perp alive and a benefit to the society while they are also punished for their crime at the same time. The how and why has given me lots to think about.

Worth a read for anyone that hasn't and it's a neat adventure of a murderer trying to outwit the law in a society with espers.

Some people are beyond rehabilitation and may or may not admit it themselves, they still deserve to be treated well even if they can't have much freedom to keep people around them safe.