I am very against medicalised punishments like this. It’s bad for medicine as a whole to be associated with it. I also think it prolongs the suffering of the person and often has things like this happen, and is mainly for the benefit of the audience not wanting to see icky blood.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
If I had to die I want the injection because if it works right you just doze off and die. That compared to being tied to a pole and have people fire guns at you seems terrible. There is a significant chance of serious pain and suffering.
Firing squads should be making a comeback given recent Trump DOJ guidelines that break with what had been the precedent on these questions.
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
The state shouldn't be able to take your life outside of war. I've had this strict belief since junior high, maybe because I was raised catholic. I don't understand how anyone can see otherwise. Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
Is your belief based in something? You say "shouldn't be able to..." but, like, why not? To convince anyone else of it you'd have to agree on the framework in which states are and aren't allowed to do things.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
> I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
> What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
Could you defend your claim if the exception for war was confined to non surrendering enemy combatants? After all, I did not take the comment on "except war" to envisage the slaughter of civilians or execution of POWs.
I mean if it was a just war I don’t disagree, but people on both sides of every modern war I can think of deserved to die a lot less than people who commit whatever sort of crime still lands you on death row these days (with the possible exception of the actual leadership in a small number of those wars but still not many).
I think it is fair to assume they meant a just war. At least, that would have been my starting assumption. This concept also has a rich literature in Catholic history, fwiw. The question of whether most modern war qualifies as just feels like a separate question that is out of scope for the present discussion, though I don't disagree with you.
How nice to see that in truth, we have the three of us all found ourselves - at least at a high level - in agreement.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
> for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me
She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.
> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now
Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
> Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.
I interpreted it as an implication that it should be viewed as a lesser crime due to the perpetrator's age. At 18 you can:
• Vote
• Fight in the military
• Act in pornography
• Rent a car in MI, NY, QC
• Many other adult things
The crime perpetrated was premeditated and particularly demonic. It's a far cry from shoplifting a Snickers bar.
> is kind of upsetting
Bringing a chunk of the victim's skull to school to show your friends how good you are at murdering was probably pretty upsetting to a few people, like the victim's family and friends.
The voting age being 18 was changed in the 70s, primarily so they could more easily justify sending 18 year olds to fight in Vietnam. Prior to 1971 it was kind of agreed that 18 year olds were still basically children.
Even now, though, in every state in the US, you're not a full adult when you're eighteen. You're not allowed to buy alcohol until you're 21. In a lot of states you're not allowed to buy cigarettes. We've decided that, despite being "grown ups", they're still not grown up enough to be trusted with these things.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
The state-administered judicial violence of locking someone in a cage until they die of old age strikes me as pretty similar to the state-administered judicial violence of executing someone, in terms of severity.
I extrapolated from the fact that 18 year olds couldn’t vote prior to 1971. I will admit that “agreed” might have been a bit too strong of a word, but it seems like the United States didn’t think that 18 year olds were “full” adults yet.
The problem with this argument is that being a few months older or younger would decide between life and death for the very same crime.
Her boyfriend who was just a couple of months younger got a lighter sentence with the option of parole, partly because he was 17.
You don’t suddenly become a different person on your 18th birthday.
Execution is a weird thing for a civilized society to do and the bizarre people that fetishize it say weird shit like “It makes sense to murder somebody if they made other people upset” to avoid talking about how it doesn’t solve any problems that aren’t already solved by life imprisonment. The justification for execution is always “I want the state to kill people because I enjoy that sort of thing”
Where should the exact cut off be? How many units of time after birth is it not too young for certain punishments? To me 18 sounds as reasonable as any. Why not even 16 in some cases. Or should it be say 21? Or 25? or 30?
I would rather we don’t have the death penalty at all, but if that’s off the table then I would probably do the cutoff at wherever the medical community says adolescence is done.
The medical community would not set a hard and fast date for this; or if they did they might well go with the legal and social definition (in most Western countries) of 18 years old.
I think the latest studies suggest adolescence can keep going until your late 20s. I agree you can’t set a firm line on that because of course these aren’t discrete things and everyone is a bit different, but maybe set an admittedly-still-arbitrary age of ~26.
Or I would just do what the UK did and stop capital punishment since I think it’s wrong.
For me the issue isn't so much to execute someone for something they did at 18 (18 is plenty old enough to knowingly do atrocious things), but rather to do it 32 years later with all the time spent in jail.
The US legal system allows for a great deal of time to be spent appealing death penalty cases, which usually takes years. Most people who support the death penalty support it happening much more quickly than decades after the sentence was passed.
The case became sensationalized when investigators said it was tied to the occult because someone had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and Pike bragged to another student that she had kept a fragment of the victim’s skull as a “souvenir.”
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
I’m against death penalty, but if you must do it, can’t you give them a massive and gradual drug overdose? It’s reliable and maybe less horrific than some of these stories you read.
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
At least the press in Nazi Germany is honest when they witness the regime botching an execution:
In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honorable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.
> An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
I believe it is the same in the case of unsuccessful abortions, in the US at least. Sometimes they result in a birth, presumably of a heavily injured and premature baby, who is then entitled to emergency medical care. Some of these people survive long term. One example is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianna_Jessen
That was the most "WTF?" in the article. No one working there thought about the nonsensicalness of calling for medical aid for someone who was supposed to be killed?
It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.
There's a lot of bad and conflicting info in the news right now, but it seems a newer "kinder, gentler" injection protocol may have been used here, which eliminates two additional drugs typically used.
The problem with that is it clearly doesn't work. In an effort to make it as comfy as possible, they succeeded in turning it into Dr. Evil's malfunctioning death chamber.
What is wrong with firing squads? They have been used longer than lethal injections. If they didn’t succeed the first time they can fire again. There’s no danger of the drugs not working or not being able to find a vein.
Also I don’t think it’s right for a prisoner to be on death row for most of their lives. 4-5 years is good enough, but after that it’s cruel.
Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.
(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)
Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.
The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.
The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.
I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.
Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)
(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)
There's no connection between "protect[ing] people" and "vengeance", The latter is not necessary for the former.
The retributive instinct should not be "fed" by the State. It is perfectly normal to have that feeling, but we should recognize it for what it is and let it stay as such. You might think this isn't possible or stable but the Nordics would prove you wrong.
What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?
>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?
My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.
Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.
Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?
Is this supposed to be an intelligent move? Is the distinction between a war and interpersonal violence really lost on you? A "one-woman civil war" is simply a sentence that fails to compile for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of civil wars.
It's ironic you speak of apprehending reality when you speak with such stretched symbolism as to render whatever your point was incomprehensible.
Can you try again without this goofy civil war metaphor? I have to as an exercise in good faith conclude this framing was somewhat unserious.
Could you defend your claim if the exception for war was confined to non surrendering enemy combatants? After all, I did not take the comment on "except war" to envisage the slaughter of civilians or execution of POWs.
How nice to see that in truth, we have the three of us all found ourselves - at least at a high level - in agreement.
I'm pretty against capital punishment in general, so take that for what it is, but executing someone for something they did when they were eighteen really bothers me.
I've never been a violent person but I do know that I was even more of an idiot then than I am now.
She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.
> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now
Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?
I didn't say there shouldn't be consequences. I just think that executing someone who committed a crime when they were effectively a child is kind of upsetting. I do not see how you extrapolated that I think it's "normal childhood indiscretion" out of what I said.
• Vote
• Fight in the military
• Act in pornography
• Rent a car in MI, NY, QC
• Many other adult things
The crime perpetrated was premeditated and particularly demonic. It's a far cry from shoplifting a Snickers bar.
> is kind of upsetting
Bringing a chunk of the victim's skull to school to show your friends how good you are at murdering was probably pretty upsetting to a few people, like the victim's family and friends.
Even now, though, in every state in the US, you're not a full adult when you're eighteen. You're not allowed to buy alcohol until you're 21. In a lot of states you're not allowed to buy cigarettes. We've decided that, despite being "grown ups", they're still not grown up enough to be trusted with these things.
To be clear, I'm perfectly fine throwing her in prison for the rest of her life without parole, like she would be had she committed the crime in a state without capital punishment like NY. I'm just particularly turned off by the death penalty. I can sit here and wax philosophical as to why but I'm sure you've heard the arguments and it would be a tangent.
You don’t suddenly become a different person on your 18th birthday.
Or I would just do what the UK did and stop capital punishment since I think it’s wrong.
What a monster... and apparently in more ways than one!
Perhaps there should be an "emergency beheading axe" available for these extreme outliers, or a third (fourth, fifth...?) dose.
2026 is really something else. 3 months left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Made_Monster
You KNOW that we are living in the Twilight Zone right now. Plus a bunch of Star Trek's (Return of the Archons) and some Hitchcock. Bang! You're Dead. With Billy Mumy.
https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/alfred-hitchcock-gun-contr...
Or would giving murderers recreational drugs not please Us voters?
What a cruel mess.
In a news conference Wednesday night, journalists who witnessed the attempted execution described snoring and complaints from Pike about pain, as well as her kicking her feet so often that she knocked off the sheets laid on her. At times, the curtain was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.
Glad the Nazi Supreme Court stepped in and honorable judges put their name under the order that allowed this to happen.
It’s easy to sign someone’s death warrant as long as you’re not the one having to press the buttons or pulling the trigger.
So they tried to kill her and then provided medical aid? What the fuck are we doing as a country. Goddamn.
There's a lot of bad and conflicting info in the news right now, but it seems a newer "kinder, gentler" injection protocol may have been used here, which eliminates two additional drugs typically used.
The problem with that is it clearly doesn't work. In an effort to make it as comfy as possible, they succeeded in turning it into Dr. Evil's malfunctioning death chamber.