Tennessee tried to kill a woman and could not. She was taken to a hospital, treated, and returned to prison, alive. Her attorneys say personnel made repeated attempts to find a vein and that she cried out in pain as the drugs were pushed. The state has not given a public account that contradicts this. Instead, the governor has paused executions and appointed a former U.S. attorney to review the process, and the corrections commissioner has resigned.
That is the standard script, and we should refuse to follow it.
The script says this was a malfunction: find the failed part, fire the responsible official, rewrite the protocol, and carry on. Tennessee has run this play before. In 2022, Lee paused executions after the state acknowledged it had not properly tested its lethal injection drugs, then restarted them once the paperwork was repaired. Each review treats the problem as one of execution technique. None asks whether a government that repeatedly cannot perform this act without chaos should be performing it at all.
The death penalty's defenders rest their case on a promise of seriousness. The state, they say, is not a murderer. It acts with solemnity, precision and restraint, and it imposes a lawful punishment, not vengeance. A procedure that sends a prisoner to the hospital because she would not die on schedule breaks that promise. What remains is a government strapping a person down and experimenting on her with chemicals, behind a curtain, while the public is assured everything is in order.
The curtain deserves as much scrutiny as the needle. States have spent years making execution more secretive: hiding drug suppliers, shielding the identities of participants, restricting what witnesses can see. They did it to keep the machinery running after pharmaceutical companies refused to supply it. The result is a system in which the public learns what happened only when a prisoner's lawyers file it in court. That is why the preservation order the attorneys won matters. Evidence of what happened in that room should not depend on the goodwill of the agency that ran it.
The reviewer should not be the end of the accountability process. A former prosecutor, chosen by the governor, reporting to the governor, is not independent in any sense a skeptic should accept. The legislature should demand the findings in public. Courts should have access to everything. And the review should be asked the question it will be tempted to avoid: how many other executions, in how many other states, looked orderly only because nobody was allowed to watch closely?
There is also a legal horror waiting at the end of this. In 1947, in Francis v. Resweber, the Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to strap a teenager into the electric chair a second time after the first attempt failed. A state that has already put a prisoner through a botched attempt may argue it is entitled to try again. The courts should say never. Whatever one believes about Christa Pike's crime, the Constitution does not exempt the state from the ban on cruel punishment because the first attempt did not succeed.
Pike was convicted of a brutal murder committed when she was 18, and Colleen Slemmer's family has waited three decades for the state to finish what it started. Their grief is real, and no one on the Left should treat it as an inconvenience. But the promise made to them was a clean, lawful, final punishment. What they got was a hospital transport. A system that makes victims' families wait decades and then delivers a spectacle is failing them too.
The pause is welcome. It should not be temporary. If Tennessee cannot show it can carry out an execution without torturing someone, the only defensible next step is to stop, and not to schedule the next date once the report is filed.
