Mother executed for killing her children

Our presumptions about human nature and behaviour are completely upended by criminal insanity. Even our most fundamental instincts can be tested by it, as it was late one night in Sherwood, Arkansas. Christina Riggs is putting her two-year-old Shelby and her five-year-old Justin to sleep. However, this heartwarming image is not what it first appears to be—it is a crime that would rock the nation. It was a terrible thought for people to be forced to consider.The role of a mother is to care for and protect her offspring. Given that it was an unnecessary murder, it's likely among the most terrible cases I've ever worked on. Christina, a 26-year-old single mother, is going to accomplish the unimaginable: she is going to kill her own flesh and blood—two innocent children who entrust their mother with their life. Christina's thinking was suddenly disturbed, leading her to violate our strongest taboo.

A mother ought to defend her own children, but in this case, she failed to do so. It is not logical. John Wesley Hall, the defence attorney, would have to attempt to explain this horrific double homicide involving two helpless children who had no idea what was going to happen. Everyone involved in the case had vivid memories of the night Christina killed her children. The fact that the killings were poorly executed made them look much more horrible. She intended to give them a potassium chloride injection, which stops the heart. She was unaware that it needed to be administered through an IV in a diluted form in order to avoid burning the skin and damaging the vein. Journalist Cathy Frye covered the case for the Arkansas Democrat-gazette, and she concluded that it won't go anywhere. The prosecution's case rested on her egregious violations and failure to perform the role she was expected to play in their lives.

Even though Christina has given her kids sedatives, nothing will make them stop hurting as the pure potassium chloride travels through their veins and towards their hearts. It burns and binds the lining of every blood vessel. She may have been attempting to imitate the medications used in deadly injections, but she lacked the necessary knowledge and ultimately caused a great deal of agony. By her own admission, Christina was given that fateful night in 1997.For the most part of her life, trouble had followed her. Christina's mother reared her alone when she and her siblings were split up at a young age. Christina wrote of being sexually abused by a family member and a neighbour in her journal. By the age of 13, she had gained a lot of weight and was really unhappy. The victim believes that if they make themselves ugly, no one will want to contact them, even though that is what they desire. This is part of the psychological barrier to the offender.

I'm going to put this shield of defence in place so that I can never again let someone break my heart by trusting the wrong person. Christina's maltreatment as a child had yet another unsettling outcome. When it came time for her to find love in her late teens, she resorted to the only form of courting she had ever experienced: sex. For women who experienced abuse as young girls, this is not rare. The abuser imparted that knowledge to them. At twenty, this is not a solid basis for a committed relationship or raising children.Christina became pregnant with her son Justin. The father left town. Then came the opportunity for happiness and the guy she would marry. When Sarah wed John Riggs, she was expecting a child, but on their wedding night, something else happened. Christina experienced a miscarriage. Shelby, their daughter, gave them a glimpse of hope a year later, but the marriage failed.

Christina found herself a single mother once more. Every tragedy pierced Christina's thoughts more deeply. A mentality that has witnessed far too much hopelessness already. Christina's mother attempted suicide when she was a newborn, a relative committed suicide, and there were rumours of a grandmother who was eventually sent to a mental health facility. But a crime that would turn Arkansas against Christina is going to overshadow her family history.Christina Riggs has put her two young children, Shelby and Justin, under sedation in Sherwood, Arkansas. She's getting ready to inject them both to death with poisonous potassium chloride, a method frequently employed in jail executions. Mothers don't usually poison their children when they kill them. I wouldn't claim, though, that she was attempting to poison them. She believed, like I did, that she would grant them a swift and painless demise.

Justin, age five, is in excruciating pain because his mother failed to calculate the concentration. Her son is simply having his veins destroyed by undiluted potassium chloride. Christina, in a panic, seeks for another morphine shot in the hopes that it may lessen the agony. It takes time for morphine to take effect if it is not administered intravenously. I have a suspicion that she was unable to insert a needle into one of his veins while he was in agony and wriggling.For those who know Christina as a devoted mother and licenced nurse, the scene is unfathomable. Christina was a nurse who was constantly trying to help people because she wanted to help people. Elizabeth Nottingham had two enlightening viewpoints on Christina: she was her sister and also a counsellor. She also required to know what motivated Christina to kill her own kids. I was almost hoping that she would turn out to be a bad mom so I could get angry with her.

I used a fine-tooth comb to go through her house; all the chemicals were hidden, the food was kept in the refrigerator, and each room had portraits of their fathers hanging over each bed. She had no trouble with the children. Christina put in a lot of overtime at Sherwood Heart Hospital out of a deep love and commitment to her kids. It was challenging enough to raise children while working a full-time job, but her extended run of bad luck didn't seem to stop.Christina entered into another romance following her divorce, but it would not work out. In addition to breaking her heart, the guy stole her credit card. Being dumped is one thing, but being taken advantage of and left penniless is quite another. broke and unable to afford to pay her family's expenses. Christina's depression is becoming worse. She admitted to the doctor that she might be sad, and Prozac was prescribed.

It was likely something she had been dealing with for a while. It's unknown if Christina was taking her medicine at the time of the murders. When someone on Prozac stops taking medicine, they may have severe mood swings, anxiety, agitation, and occasionally even recurring depression. Thus, the ideal storm was building up for her. She was depressed and had experienced numerous personal setbacks. People talk about Mondays and rainy days. Actually, the song on her CD player was about rainy days and Mondays.When Christina Riggs, 26, realises that her plan to poison her two children has not worked, she loses her cool. She now turns to suffocation. A pillow or fluffy blanket is typically placed over the face of the victim when someone smothers them. The cause of death is hypoxia or a shortage of oxygen. It damages the brain, expands it, and crushes the important brain structures near the base of the brain. 

People having to consider a mother who may smother her children by placing a pillow over their faces was a terrible thought. I don't think anyone was prepared or wanted to talk about why she did it. After carefully placing her children's bodies on her bed, the young mother makes an attempt at suicide. The remaining 28 antidepressants in the bottle are then taken by her.When she attempted to inject potassium chloride into her arm, the vein collapsed and a burn hole was caused. Christina wasn't a cold-blooded killer; rather, she had wanted to end her own life but couldn't bear to leave her kids behind. She had originally intended to kill herself without include the children, but two days prior to the act, she made the decision to involve them.

She feared that if she abandoned the children, they would be split up, taken to their father's house, and separated. She simply believed that there was no other option and that no one else could possibly look after her children. She reasoned that by doing so, she was protecting them from suffering in the future. However, Christina's sorrow doesn't finish that evening. Her mother discovered her 19 hours after the incident, and she was barely alive. After escaping her attempted suicide, Christina is now the target of public outrage. She's vilified only because she survived. Nobody would have cared to look into this or looked into it if she had died. Whatever the reason, it would have been an awful thing to happen. Out of all of her suffering and our family's sorrow, all I can hope for is that we may help others understand the reasons behind this so they may perhaps recognise the signs and circumstances and take action to help someone else.

Christina faces two counts of first-degree murder, each of which is capital punishment. We made an effort to demonstrate that she was acting really erratically when we were in Arkansas. To support the decision to either spare her the death penalty or, ideally, declare her guilty of second-degree murder. But many would have discounted Christina's mental state during her trial. They saw her decision to absolve herself of parenthood as a callous and self-serving one. The testimony from the doctors, which I believe scared people the most, was that it would have taken three to six minutes to suffocate a person.Most just wanted her to be wicked because it made things simpler. Christina Riggs is found guilty by a jury. She faces a death by lethal injection sentence. The identical object she had attempted to end her life with. In the end, it all came down to what she had tried that evening: potassium chloride was going to be the lethal medication that kill her

With the exception of her being tied to a table, it was a horrible irony that they completed what she had begun. They are given the opportunity to say their final words since John Wesley Hall saw the execution and her face is visible. It's very startling to observe when the medications take effect and cause your face to turn grey. Your skin also goes grey. One of a woman's strongest emotional tendencies is her impulse to defend, but in the case of a mind as warped by despair and self-loathing as Christina's, that instinct can become lethal. Black depression had taken hold of her, and she did not want to leave her children in this harsh, terrible world. That's not the right thing to think, but that's what she was thinking—to live a terrible life as it was.