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
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.
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.
Nope
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
There’s a man on death row in Texas named Robert Roberson. He’s come VERY close a few times to being executed (at one point, a few hours) and he’s most likely innocent. He was convicted based on shaken baby syndrome. It’s been disproved a long while ago. Thankfully though he’s getting a new trial and hopefully he’ll be found not guilty. Still sucks that he’s been on death row for decades
Yeah, it’s abysmal. The fact that even one innocent person was executed should have shut the whole thing down. But it was never about justice, just expressing power.
No a lot of people do point to some pretty extreme crimes (particularly the weird rape torture serial murderers, especially if their chosen victims were children) as their reason for wanting the death penalty available. Unfortunately though I’m on the side of preventing even one innocent wrongfully sentenced, and I agree that the barriers to that are going to get broken down pretty fast.
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.
And therein lies the true difference between republicans and democrats. One would kill an innocent person just to make sure the other guilty people suffered. Just like they would kill food stamps for hundreds of thousands, just to make sure one person didn’t get more than they “deserved.” Just like they would deport millions of innocent hard working people just to make sure a few criminals go along with them.
They’re comfortable hurting and taking innocent lives, because all of their moral/political values are rooted in hatred, fear, and spite.