Tennessee's second botched execution in five months needs forty minutes of snoring to register.

…(cont) This was not Tennessee's first miss of the year. In May, officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers after the team could not place an IV at all — the drug never entered him, because the line never went in. That is a different failure than Pike's. She received two full doses of pentobarbital and kept breathing; he received none. The receipts don't say what, if anything, went wrong with the drug itself in his case, because nothing got that far. What the two attempts share is not a drug or a dose. It's a year, a state, and a protocol that has now failed twice in five months in two entirely different ways.

Only after the second failure did Governor Lee halt executions — all of them, for the rest of the year — and order an independent inquiry into Wednesday night. "Legal and constitutional" turns out to be a lower bar than the one that actually matters in the chamber, which is whether the sentence is carried out at all. Tennessee spent two doses of pentobarbital and one unplaceable IV finding that out in public, in front of witnesses, with a clock running that reached forty minutes before anyone behind the glass called it.

The inquiry is independent. As of Wednesday night, the protocol that produced it is not.