Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
Ms. Pike continues to receive critical medical care at a Nashville hospital, the lawyers said. The prognosis remains unclear, they said, but they expect a long recovery.
“Christa is a survivor and will take recovery one day at a time,” the lawyers said.
Ms. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug. She has been hospitalized since the execution attempt on Sept. 30, after it became clear to witnesses that she was still breathing after two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used in lethal injection executions.
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A long drop hanging with a good rope is pretty idiot-proof. If you don’t have well-trained executioners, you’ll rip a few heads off, or have a few people die from cerebral oedema instead of fracturing the neck, but they’re still dead within minutes at worst.
Filling a chamber with nitrogen works well - nobody has yet managed to live without oxygen.
The guillotine (when properly maintained and well built) works very reliably. You just need not to be too squeamish about blood.
A firing squad is pretty effective.
But Americans just have to invent new ways to kill people in ways that they think will be less gruesome.
Executions are not quiet, peaceful things, and attempts to make them so are misguided.
To paraphrase John Oliver, there are better and worse positions to fuck your mother, but at the end of the day, you’re still a motherfucker.
Executions don’t save much money, when you consider the expense of building, maintaining, and operating the machinery of death. They are not an effective deterrent to crime (this is counter-intuitive: people don’t think it be like it is, but it do.) They are irreversible, and courts have repeatedly sentenced innocent people to death.
Just abolish the death penalty. I’m happy that I live in a country that doesn’t do it anymore.