Pike survived a lethal injection execution on Wednesday. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer.

Christa Pike, the woman who survived an execution attempt in Tennessee earlier this week, is on a ventilator as she receives care in the hospital, her lawyers said in a new statement Friday.

“Christa remains critically ill and is receiving medical care for the devastating effects of Wednesday night’s events,” the lawyers’ statement said. “She is critically ill, unconscious, intubated and receiving breathing assistance through a ventilator.”

The statement said she is being treated for “the serious effects of the pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms.”

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[+] -13 points 1 month ago (59 children)

The only time I can agree with the death sentence is if the subject of it has proven to be 1, incorrigible and guaranteed to repeat offend 2, have an offence so vile that they cannot be risked a release into the public, either intentionally or accidentally 3, whose guilt has been established in irrefutable manner.

Think absolute menace serial killer psychos. Child rapists.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 month ago (18 children)

    This comment implies the motivation is to protect the public from particularly dangerous offenders.

    Life in prison without the possibility of parole is similarly protective.

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  • [+] -23 points 1 month ago (17 children)

    No it isn't - see "accidental" (unintentional) release.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago (16 children)

    So the incompetence of prisons is what makes you in favor of executing people?

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  • [+] -16 points 1 month ago (15 children)

    No. The possibility of a murderer, who tortures and kills people for fun, escaping and torturing and murdering even more people makes me to consider it for the worst of the worst.

    99.999% of all incarcerated can be rehabilitated - sure, some might never understand why it was wrong to kill, but at the very least you can get to a point where they won't do it again - given the appropriate treatment and effort.

    It's the remaining 0.001% - the once a decade psychopaths, the Dahmers, the Lecters, and so on - whom are not rehabilitable, whom cannot even be in a regular prison, who require isolation and constant watch, who cannot be allowed even the chance of escaping.

    Why? Because I value the multitudes of lives of the potential victims over the singular life of someone who clearly doesn't care about others'.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    No. ... escaping

    So you say 'no', but you explain 'yes'.

    The rest of your fiction doesn't hold water either. You will never be able to separate the 99.999% from the 0.001% with a 100% of certainty. I for one think a girl that committed a gruesome murder at the age of 18 has at least a non-zero percent chance of rehabilitation.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 month ago

    Your reading comprehension is lacking, and it's showing.

    And I think I very specifically pulled her example out as someone who CAN be rehabilitated. She doesn't deserve the death penalty, arguably not even the life sentence (probably 20 years would be fair).

    Prison should not be about punishing someone for what they did, but to ensure that 1, they don't do it again once released 2, they understand why what they did was wrong.

    Therefore the death sentence should only be applicable to those who have committed an egregious enough crime AND have proven to be impossible to rehabilitate.

    But please let's continue nitpicking because that's totally going to resolve this debate...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Just a heads up that Lecter is a fictional character. There are plenty of real-life monsters to list that you don't need Lecter -- Gacy, Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, Green River Killer, BTK...

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Not most, maybe (c'mon, Gacy and Ted Bundy are unknown outside of the states????), but certainly they'd know Jack the Ripper.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    I disagree with you, but I disagree more with the people who are downvoting you for sharing your opinion.

    You're engaging in conversation and debate respectfully, and people shouldn't be downvoting you for that.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    downvoting is just expressing a disagreement then? Is it disrespectful to express than an opinion is wrong using the tools this platform is built around? really strange way of thinking

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    The "netiquette" for platforms with these kinds of functions has been that downvotes are for comments that don't contribute to discussion, are rule-breaking, needlessly adversarial, etc.

    It makes sense, because downvoting hides comments from other readers. Doing that to respectful contributors who you disagree with will turn this into a platform filled with circle jerks and groupthink.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (3 children)

    It's because they're arguing from a position of emotion, not facts.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That may be why you're downvoting, but I'd wager most people are downvoting because they disagree with what that person is saying. Besides, do you downvote arguments you agree with when they aren't backed by factual evidence? Do you think the others do too?

    And it shouldn't matter if their arguments come from emotion rather than facts -- shouldn't discussions of ethical matters take subjective things like emotion into consideration? They're engaging and contributing to discussion in good faith. Downvoting that kind of stuff is how we end up creating circle jerks and groupthink.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 month ago (37 children)

    guilt has been established in irrefutable manner

    Since this is impossible, I'm firmly against the death penalty.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Not necessarily in favour of the death penalty, but would you say that the crimes of Donald Trump qualify as having been "established in an irrefutable manner"? I certainly would, and his irrefutably proven crimes include treason, admitted rape, financial crimes in the billions of dollars, suborning genocide, and a myriad of direct war crimes. Are these sufficient to convince you that some place like the ICC in the Hague should have the death penalty as an option, since so many of the war crimes and crimes against humanity are irrefutably proven? For instance, should Benjamin Netanyahu face the death penalty, should he ever be brought to the Hague? Just genuinely curious about the implications of your take.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    There's certainly enough evidence to convict him, but I wouldn't think it deserves the death penalty even if I wasn't completely against the death penalty.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    That answers my question, thanks! I was trying to figure out if that incontrovertibility was actually the mitigating factor, since he's personally responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes against hundreds and hundreds of innocents, all of which his own statements effectively admit, and is also clearly guilty of treason, which is one of the few crimes that is regularly punished with death, so I figured that would neatly delineate it, and it did. I guess, then, that it's not because crimes can't be fully proven that you oppose the death penalty.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago*

    It's one factor.

    I'm not going to say I'm 100% against the death penalty in any and all circumstances, but I can't think of any cases where I would want the person put to death. Like even if you had the most open-and-shut case, like someone went up and murdered someone on the street in cold blood, with mountains of evidence and completely unrepentant, no psychosis or brain tumor or anything, I don't see what good putting them to death would do. Put them in prison and forget about them.

    So because of that it's easier just to be against it in general rather than look for the tiny sliver of corner cases that I might agree with it.

    Edit: also generally I'm against it because it can't be taken back if it comes out we were wrong. And because it can be abused by malicious actors.

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  • [+] -20 points 1 month ago (30 children)

    No it isn't impossible.

    Objective, irrefutable evidence exists. Video recordings that clearly show one's face, with further supporting evidence to ensure its not mistaken identity.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (15 children)

    How do you prove the video hasn't been tampered with?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago

    I feels like you're missing the point. There's a tons of cases where innocent people get prison time despite no hard proof on them(via coercion or the lack of alibi), then there's guilty people who hired a gang of lawyers to throw out hard evidence one by one(by finding every minor mistake by the prosecutor). It's incredibly hard to proof people are beyond reasonable doubt that they should be executed, especially when the guilty can just play innocent.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    For now. At this point, it doesn't matter much if the AI economic bubble collapses, research will continue, potentially at a lesser pace, and could still outpace, even if temporarily, detection methods.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago*

    Humans will still be behind the "forensic science", and humans are fallible. There was just a DNA forensic analyst who was found guilty of evidence tampering. She was overworked so just... Made stuff up.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/colorado-crime-analyst-manipulated-dna-data-sentenced-rcna596722

    Also as someone who currently works in the legal field, expert witness testimony is not the slam dunk you assume it is.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    How do you know the attestation key hasn't been compromised, allowing me to sign any video I want?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Where is the line between "objective and irrefutable" and "room for reasonable doubt"?

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  • [–] -5 points 1 month ago

    Where is it today?

    If there's no contradictory evidence, then there's no room for doubt. At that point it is up to the jury to make the decision - including if the death penalty should be applied, if the person truly poses a danger to society justifying their death.

    Again, in my opinion, the death penalty is 99% antiquated. The only time it is ever justified if the person's existence in itself poses a threat to the public. A simple murder, no matter how grievous, like this case, is definitely not death penalty worthy. The likes of John Wayne Gacy, or Jeffrey Dahmer. Of whom there's maybe one every decade or so.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    The words you're using have rules. I don't mean this in an adversarial way, but you are wrong.
    Irrefutable evidence does not prove the claim, it just proves that you can't refute the evidence. Video evidence can be misleading or fake. DNA evidence needs context to prove anything.
    Anyway, like I say, these things have rules. The only things in the entire human domain that can be positively proved are mathematical statements. This is why gravity remains a theory, even after 350 years. One single counterexample disproves it. There are numerous examples of this happening in the context of the death penalty, where a jury was so convinced of guilt they condemned someone who was later executed, then, later still, new information emerged which proved them to be innocent.
    Just by the pure first-principles of logic, the death sentence is a bad idea.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    Again; it is not possible to completely exclude the potential of them being innocent. That is literally beyond the wit of man.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    Yes, it is.
    You're not being down voted by idiots. You're being down voted by people who have learned how logic works. Maybe you could, too? It takes minutes/hours.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    You claim to be applying logic yet failing to do so even at this one query.

    No, it's not impossible to establish guilt without doubt. It has happened many times, and will happen with forensic sciences advancing. You claiming repeatedly that this statement is somehow false, does not make it so.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I've also explained how it is false. I can only explain it to you; I can't understand it for you. Good luck mate.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Video footage in the age of LLM is completely worthless as evidence.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    A year or two they couldn't even fool the average viewer though. To prove a video is real you'd also have to prove there's no model out there in the world (including in private testing) that could create a good enough fake.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago*

    Congratulations, you support the death penalty.

    Unless, you know, you can point to something death penalty supporters have said that’s any different from what you just said?

    In fact, you’ve taken it a step further by including child rapists, who generally aren’t put to death by the state- so not only do you support the death penalty, you support it being expanded.

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