Christa’s mother drank heavily and used drugs while she was pregnant with Christa resulting in brain damage which caused Christa’s bipolar disorder.
When Christa was 14 months old, she suffered a seizure. Her mother refused to leave the bar to take her to the hospital.
After Christa was born, her mother left Christa and her brother without food, crawling in dog feces, while she drank with her boyfriends.
Her mother allowed her boyfriends to beat Christa and twist her nipples. One beat Christa with a belt and sexually assaulted her.
When Christa tried to commit suicide after that, a psychiatrist told her mother Christa was severely depressed and needed help. Her mother denied Christa further help and her bipolar disorder was not treated.
When Christa was raped at 11 by a man in the neighborhood, her mother denied it until she developed an infection and the man was arrested.
When Christa was raped at 17, one year to the day before she committed murder with her boyfriend, Christa’s mother didn’t care.
But Christa was happy to see her mother in court during her trial and all she wanted was a hug.
Yes, Christa committed an extremely heinous murder at 18. But I just wanted to share a little bit of her story with you — especially for all the folks rejoicing at her execution.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/28/tennessee-woman-execution-christa-pike
The girl had pretty much the worst life imaginable in any rich country, leading to an extremely predictable outcome.
I’ve read this exact story many times, and it always ends the same.
For that she gets 32 years of pointless suffering, and then a failed attempt at death penalty.
If only there was money to fund help for such people. Anyway, let’s spend another billion dollars on bombing children in Iran.
I’m not excusing what she did, but how is taking someone’s life going to bring back the victim, or give closure to the family of the victim? American “justice” is about revenge, not justice. The death penalty should be gone, utterly and completely. It’s barbaric.
It’s not about either justice or revenge. It’s mostly about getting rid of troublesome people, because they’re bad for business.
… 32 years later?
although I agree with most of what you say, death penalties are important to reduce the impact to taxpayer dollars.
no reason to continue rehabilitating a prisoner who is going to spend life in prison for brutally raping a 5 year old. just remove them from the world and move on.
According to recent estimates, the death penalty costs taxpayers 2.5 to 5 times more than life imprisonment.
I did a research report on this in grade school. The costs are mostly tied to the amount of appeals they are mandated to get and the average length of stay before execution.
I came to the conclusion in my research paper that Republicans would likely eventually pass laws to limit the appeals and fast track execution.
I think I got a C on the paper because of the editorialization about what I thought would happen in the future. I am actually surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
And despite all those appeals there’s about 1-8% rate of wrongful executions. Fucking 1/20 people executed may very well be innocent
Because there just aren’t that many Americans that care about this issue, unfortunately. I’ve had discussions with straight up dreadlocked hippy liberals and they still use the “you’d feel differently if they killed someone in your family” bullshit. No. I wouldn’t because I have a principled stance that the state should not be murdering its citizens. No amount of violent, depraved criminals getting “what they deserved” justifies the death of one falsely accused person, and we are well past one in this fucked up system.
We are a cruel, spiteful, and violent people. Even our granola munching hippies can’t get behind abolishing the death penalty.
source from your source is limited in scope.
FROM AN ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC COSTS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN OKLAHOMA, PREPARED FOR THE OKLAHOMA DEATH PENALTY REVIEW COMMISSION, 2017
your source is also clearly biased.
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPI) is a national non-profit organization providing the media, policymakers, and the general public with data and analysis on issues concerning capital punishment and the people it affects. For more than 30 years, DPI has been the preeminent national resource for timely and trustworthy information about the death penalty. DPI does not take a position on the death penalty itself but is critical of problems in its application.
Founded in 1990, DPI promotes insightful discourse on the death penalty by curating and presenting expansive, authoritative data from credible sources and offering clear, reliable, and timely information and research about the history and current application of the death penalty. DPI’s careful tracking and analysis of death sentences, executions, legislation, and newsworthy events provides critical context to inform meaningful public debate and sound policy decisions.
meaning the information they provide is forthright and true but their delivery of which is curated and formulated to strengthen their position.
it’s clear what their position is once you read a handful of their articles, and they are free to hold that position. however, it’s not okay to use them as a definitive source of truth when arguing a point because they obviously have an agenda.
Even if it was true, which it isn’t, fuck taxpayer dollars. You don’t give your government the power to murder its citizens to save some money.
You don’t give your government the power to murder its citizens to save some money.
you clearly haven’t been paying attention to government spending for the last century.
We have so many people in prison, more than 1% of our population! It’s costing us so much money. What should we do about it?
Well I suppose we could just start killing them, that’d save us a fair bit of money
most american thought process of all time
ah yes. let’s try to rehabilitate the mass rapist murderers that have dozens of victims.
yeah, we can fix them!
Countries who droped penal death have seen the number of terrible crimes reducing. I don’t think there is a single example where their number have grown. There are hypothesis to explain it.
Also, the only way to prevent a large abuse of penal death is to keep convicted offenders in jail for a long time before their execution ; which negate the economical argument. It was not acceptable on a moral point of view, but it is not even cheaper.
Something costy and not efficient should be replaced by something cheaper and more efficient. Especially when the second is better on a moral point of view.
Countries who droped penal death have seen the number of terrible crimes reducing.
countries who dropped penal death convictions are more likely to have early intervention programs because their government is focused on social benefits over corporate profits.
just because they have banned death penalties does not mean that it reduced “terrible crimes”.
You are right that nothing proves that droping penal death reduces the crimes. There could be no link between both, it could be a pure coincidence happening in the hundred countries droping it.
Also, and despite a constant populist pressure in each of this countries, very few have reintroduced it (and most of them fastly droped it back again).
Of course, some may have droped it out of diplomatic pressure more than for their population… but still, it brings benefices. Sorry, I mean the coincidental effect on crimes is observed ; and so at the very least droping penal death does not rise the numbers nor severity of crimes.
…And justice for all
Death penalty in place of mental health while the bastard pedophiles are elected to positions of power
A society practicing the death penalty will never improve
That’s conservatism. Conservatives demand this and delight in it. The only thing that can bring a conservative a glimmer of joy is the suffering of the vulnerable.
Here here, it is a barbaric and hamfisted revenge.
The same way she had zero right to decide who lives or dies, the state had zero right too. No questions here, the death penalty is inexcusable under any circumstances. Only under the most extreme cases should it be recognized for protection and self defence but it still shouldnt be celebrated but regarded as a necessary evil. And also yeah, there are cases like “what if i killed hitler” but first of all that would be war and second, thats such an extreme case that you cant make a law arround it. Hitler and similar people represent such a hatefull ideology that them being alive is an active danger to millions of people and an excuse to kill.
if we’re going to have a death penalty, it should require the utmost clarity in guilt and mandatory appeals to be resolved in a timely manner - then do it by guillotine. this bullshit of ‘humane execution’ is garbage whitewashing to help the people who want executions to be somehow clean and tidy - resulting in these shit show performances and drug companies refusing to work with states. afaik guillotine never requires a second try. you can fuck up hangings, hell even firing squads… it’s what I’d pick if I were being executed, not really trusting the states that end with these results.
You don’t have to have strong opinions and put them on the internet, you know?
No questions here, the death penalty is inexcusable under any circumstances. Only under the most extreme cases should it be recognized for protection and self defence but it still shouldnt be celebrated but regarded as a necessary evil.
Way to contradict yourself within 2 sentences.
Not a contradiction at all, and it’s not even all that nuanced either.
There’s a massive difference between death as punishment for a crime versus deadly force to stop someone from killing you first.
One takes place while those involved would otherwise be in relative safety.
The other typically takes place during a tense altercation where moment to moment decisions mean life or death.
It’s a contradiction with what they said, but not their intent.
The death penalty is irrelevant to self-defense and protection. The death penalty is literally only a state executing someone as punishment. Self-defense in the moment is not the death penalty. Protecting yourself is not the death penalty.
But that’s what the comment said should be allowed in extreme cases for protection and self-defense. The death penalty.
I get what they meant. Killing another human in general should only be an extreme case of self-defense or protection. But they way they worded it would mean allowing the state to execute someone to protect others.
“I can’t kill him because it would contradict my stance on the death penalty” -me, getting attacked by a crazy guy with a knife
Why was she imprisoned for 32 years when she was already sentenced to death? What’s the point? I don’t agree with the death penalty in general, but if you’re going to do it, just do it?
Standard practice in the US. You know you will die but you do not know when and in the meantime you rot in jail for decades.
Then sometimes an hour before you will be executed you hear you may get pardoned, and then a few hours later you will be executed anyway.
Execution itself also goes wrong many times.
USA! USA!
Not just imprisoned, she’s been in solitary for 30 fucking years.
So when she does torture and murder it’s the death penalty, but when the system does it they just ignore it. Love that.
What the FUCK? That is straight up torture.
Pike, who is now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, one of their classmates at Knoxville Job Corps in 1995.
In case anyone else was curious about the crime she committed
They also tortured her a bit before the murder:
According to court testimony, for the next 30 minutes, Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed. Shipp used a box cutter to carve a pentagram into her chest while she was still alive. Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer’s skull with a large chunk of asphalt, killing her.
So dumb. She requested a All female firing squad because she was concerned the injection and her small veins might be an issue.
That’s the whole issue. It’s like 50% actual narcissists without remorse and 50% just sad circumstances all around.
The death penalty is an extremely cruel way to “get rid of the problem” by fighting the symptom. But to get there, so many things would have gone wrong, and we should always prioritize fixing those things before ever thinking about punishment.
People love retribution but the truth is you can torture a murderer and that still won’t bring the victim back and even then that’s not satisfying to the victim’s family.
It’s sad but world people have as much sympathy for a man on death row? Would they even care to read how bad his childhood was? Most people wouldn’t care. Let’s see if somebody takes up for a condemned man and how much social media attention it gains.
That said, I’m not strictly in favour of the death penalty. No matter what the penalty is, people will commit crimes. But we have to do something. I’m not sure what, though.
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