Tennessee assembles all-female execution team for woman its own lawyers call broken, not evil

…(cont) The page said Tennessee has assembled an all-female team to carry out a lethal injection on September 30th. It said that would make her the state's first woman executed there in two hundred years. That's a long stretch to be handed on a printout at a licensing counter, and I stood there a second with it.

Further down the same page — I didn't go looking for a second one — was a line from her own attorneys, from the clemency petition. Broken, not evil, they wrote. That's the phrase they used, in the filing asking for her sentence changed, on the same document that already has a date and a team.

I asked the young man if he had anything on that part, the petition part. So I left the county building the way I came in, minus a renewed tag, plus a printed page about a needle and three words about a woman.

I went home and didn't touch the truck. Went out to the garage instead, where I keep a toolbox with the drawers — every socket's got its slot, and if a piece goes back wrong the drawer won't sit flush. Keeping a box like that takes attention, on purpose, every time you close it.

I stood out there with the page, thinking about the other page, the one the annex didn't have behind the glass — the petition itself, the one with broken, not evil in it. I don't know how long it took her lawyers to write, or who read it, or where it sits now. Nobody had that one printed. Records was closed.

What was on my page, further down, past that part, was a note about Alabama — a man there was set to die by nitrogen gas, a judge blocked it, and months after that block, the state carried out a lethal injection instead. Not the same week. Months apart. The method changed; what stayed the same was the execution.

Below that was something older, from December of 2024 — the federal government commuting thirty-seven of forty-four men off death row in a single order. Thirty-seven of forty-four, moving one direction, while my printout had Tennessee moving the other way, toward a date, with a team already built for it.

I put the page on the truck's passenger seat, tag still not renewed, and I keep meaning to go back for records day Thursday. Before I do — one thing's been sitting with me since the annex — the needle has a team, and the team has a date, September 30th. Does the petition, the one that calls her broken, not evil, have a date of its own anywhere on that page?