How not to make crime pay

 by J.R. Dunn

The record shows clearly enough that when liberal-leftists don’t want to do something but have to do it anyway, they go to great lengths to make it so complex, so convoluted, and so nonsensical as to make it next to impossible to carry out. During the Cold War, liberals didn’t want to fight the Soviet Union. So they set all sorts of ground rules and arbitrary, meaningless dictums that hamstrung the U.S. while allowing the Soviets to do what they damn well pleased. Lyndon Johnson, the last doctrinaire liberal president, really didn’t want to fight in Vietnam. So instead, he ordered a kind of Kabuki play war in which U.S. forces were limited to making ferocious pantomimes while the Viet Cong and the PAVN slaughtered people right and left.

Domestically, the same is true of crime. Leftists are convinced that punishment accomplishes nothing, and that crime will simply vanish once capitalism disappears and the fantasy society in the back of their heads becomes reality. So they cut ‘em loose, dole out meaningless punishments, and reward bad behavior. That is true of every crime up the ladder to murder. Which is how we get to Christa Pike.

Christa Pike is one of the worst of the worst. Along with two goon pals, she tortured a young girl to death for the offense of waving at her boyfriend. When they were finished, she took a piece of the girl’s skull (Just think about that for a minute. They crushed her head so brutally that the pieces were lying there to be picked up.) as a trophy. She showed it off to others at the job training center where this took place.

Pike is human filth, and the world will be cleaner once she is gone.

Needless to say, despite all those facts, it required thirty-one years to get her to the death chamber. It was there that, last night, she was injected with two loads of “lethal chemicals.” She survived both, and was taken from the prison to a hospital, where at the time of this writing, she is still alive.

How could this have happened? Simple. It happened because it was meant to happen.

The older methods of execution, the vicious, disturbing ones that make all suburbanites want to lie down, had two benefits: they were quick, and they were sure. That went for the bullet, the rope, the chair, even the guillotine, though its very existence expresses something demonic in the French character. When the trap was sprung or the rifles fired, you could be almost certain of the result. Firing squads even featured the coup de grace (another French contribution), to ensure mortality.

But “lethal chemicals”? That’s something else altogether. In the forty years these chemicals have been used in executions in the U.S. (they were first adapted in Oklahoma in 1977 and first used in Texas in 1982), they have proven to be problematic at best. They were sold as being “humane,” which actually means that they lacked the brute-force aspects of the earlier methods: the blood from the bullet hole, the body dangling at the end of the rope. But it was exactly that brute force that made these methods swift and sure.

The history of the “lethal injection” method has been a black comedy of errors, ineptness, drugs that had lost potency, and simple uncertainty as to results, very likely caused by commonplace differences in human metabolism, body chemistry, and so forth. (Unlikely to ever enter consideration, since, as we all know, leftism dismisses any differences between individuals at any level.) Humane? Prisoners have died screaming that they were burning up. They have lain on the death gurneys gasping for breath for minutes on end. There can be few things more terrible than lying bound while feeling yourself die by inches. Give me the bullet, if you please.

If Pike survives, it is unlikely that she’ll be subject to execution again. Look for her lawyers to sue the state of Tennessee on the grounds of “cruel and unusual punishment,” and look for a lunatic judge somewhere in the system to find in her favor. A mockery of justice, any way you look at it.

No state authorizes death by hanging. (It’s still on the books in New Hampshire, but execution has actually been banned there.) Nine states authorize death by the electric chair. Five states allow death by firing squad. (In Idaho, it was made the primary means of execution this past July.)

This is one case where the old ways are the best ways. If we need to execute people at all – and we do – we need to do it by methods that are swift, certain, straightforward, and yes, merciful.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/how-not-to-make-crime-pay/