On Thursday, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the commutation of 548 death sentences, reducing the sentence of everyone on the state’s death row to life without parole. California has more people sentenced to capital punishment than any other state, but for years there has been a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty. Newsom’s action ensures that the moratorium is…
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Christa Pike, whose twice-botched execution in Tennessee last month has renewed calls for abolishing the death penalty in the United States, spoke out about her experience on Friday, a month after she had “walked into the execution chamber at Riverbend men’s prison prepared to die.” “I had made my peace,” Pike said in a statement dictated by her legal team. “I had told the people who loved me…
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Conservative figures have reacted with glee to the Trump administration’s approval of a firing squad death sentence for Muslim Army member Nidal Malik Hasan, in what would be the first execution carried out by the U.S. military in over six decades. Hasan was convicted of committing a mass shooting at Texas’s Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 people, with jurors recommending a maximum sentence of…
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Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted executions for the remainder of the year after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections on Wednesday. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Prior to the scheduled execution…
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Tennessee woman Christa Pike has been hospitalized after surviving two lethal injection doses administered by state officials on Wednesday evening, marking the second botched execution in the state this year and prompting a pause on executions in the state. The execution of Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995 at the age of 18, was scheduled for Wednesday morning…
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Christa Pike was sexually abused and raped from the time when she was a toddler until almost a year to the day before she was arrested in 1995 at age 18 for murdering fellow teenager Colleen Slemmer when the two attended a job training program for troubled youth in Knoxville. Tennessee officials do not dispute these facts. “I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had…
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