Update from Abraham.

Christa Pike - What's Missing from the Discussion?

First, in all of this, how many of us can name the victim in this case? It's Colleen Slemmer, and you will always find the name of the victim(s) in the first line of any Death Penalty Action petition. Let's be sure, as abolitionists, that we are always remembering the victim(s), just not with more killing.

What happened to Christa Pike is unprecedented in that she lived. We still don't have the facts about why this went wrong, but one possible scenario is similar to what Oklahoma did to Clayton Lockett. The needle went through his vein and the drugs went into his muscle, causing severe burns. That was a different drug. He ended up dying of a heart attack about 45 minutes in.

Christa is still alive, as far as we know. In what condition, we don't know. We'll all be waiting and watching.  

Meanwhile, for Death Penalty Action, the issue is not HOW we kill our prisoners, but THAT we allow executions at all when the system is as broken as it is.

Case in point: The issue is much less about Christa Pike and more about the circus that the death penalty has become. Lost in THIS CASE is the question of why the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a last-minute stay on Wednesday morning. The government lied in court about the facts of the sexual abuse Pike endured as a child in order to keep her from testifying about that. That is the conversation that also needs to be had.

And then we have all of the secrecy about Tennessee's execution process, and the bizarre and unheard of play by play of how things went down on Wednesday evening. The biggest development yesterday was that the Director of the Tennessee Department of Corrections will be resigning.

Frank Strada was a nightmare for prisoners in his previous job in Arizona, and no less so in Tennessee. It is only when something like this occur that people pay attention, but anybody who's been focused on what's happening in Tennessee prisons since he arrived knows that he should never have been hired in the first place.

The real problem is that Tennessee's current Governor acts like he cares, but he hired Strada for a reason. What happened to Christa Pike was inevitable given all of the warnings they had about her medical conditions. Frank Strada didn't care. The cruelty is the point with Tennessee's current authoritarian regime.

What's worse is the presumptive next Governor, who is known as one of the most corrupt members of the US Senate. She was quick to announce her plan to shift to the electric chair, and don't be surprised when Tennessee allows firing squad executions.  

All of these Christian Nationalist politicians have the same agenda, which is to soak up money for themselves and their rich friends, at the expense of tax payers. When it comes to the corrections industry, whether it's public or private, the last people they are concerned about are the prisoners.

What can we do about it? #1 - Vote our values. #2 - Keep shining a spotlight on it. #3 - Never, ever, be a bystander. Speak up at every opportunity!

One Silver Lining

One of the silver linings to the darkness of last week is that for the second time, Gary Sutton's execution date has been put off due to something completely unrelated to his case. Gary Sutton won't be killed in December, but he is in all likelihood an innocent man, and we must all keep shouting it from the rooftops!

https://deathpenaltyaction.org/