Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Thursday called on Tennessee to reintroduce the electric chair for executions after death-row prisoner Christa Pike survived two lethal injections the day before. Blachburn, who is the GOP nominee in the Volunteer State's gubernatorial race, called the botched execution “tragic”
Page B1From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 October 2026
SECOND FAILURE
Tennessee's humane execution method fails twice this year, still not out of pilot phase after 47 years
As it ran on the front
Born in the promise that a government could kill a person without cruelty, the era of the humane lethal injection died Wednesday night in the execution chamber in Nashville. It was not young. It survived a federal moratorium in 2006, when a California judge ruled lethal injection unconstitutional and Florida suspended its own machine after Ángel Nieves Díaz took 34 minutes to die. It survived 2009, when Florida executed John Marek as the 68th person put to death by injection since the state restored the penalty in 1979, each execution logged as proof the method worked as advertised.
It did not survive Christa Pike. She received a double dose of pentobarbital, the drug meant to end a life inside minutes. Witnesses said she was still snoring forty minutes later. Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, called the result "deeply disturbing," suspended every execution in the state through the end of the year, and ordered an inquiry into what is, by flat count, the second failed lethal injection his state has produced this year alone. Fox News explained afterward that the pentobarbital may simply not have reached a fatal concentration — a sentence that reads less like science reporting and more like a parts recall notice.…
…(cont) Three words, and mercy was not one of them.
Senator Marsha Blackburn, also the Republican nominee for governor, called the botched execution "tragic," said it prolonged the grief of victims' families, and proposed Tennessee bring back the electric chair. National Review asked, fairly, whose fault this was. The record offers no answer, only malarkey.
It is preceded in death by hanging and the firing squad, each retired for the same cruelty this method was invented to cure.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks only that the inquiry into the state's failure not be conducted by the state that failed.
“The state built a whole machine to make killing someone look clean, and it took forty minutes of snoring to show the paint job. Tennessee's answer to a failed execution isn't fewer executions, it's a nicer chair. They'll find the budget for an electric chair faster than they'll find it for the inquiry that's supposed to watch them.”
“Look, nobody's defending incompetence — this is a drug supply issue, not a death-penalty issue. Pentobarbital just didn't reach the right concentration, that's a compounding pharmacy problem, it's not — wait, did I just say the state's execution protocol has a supply chain issue? That doesn't sound like something I should be saying out loud.”
The receipts
The mother of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike's victim has slammed officials after she watched the botched lethal injection attempt.
This represents the second failed attempt at an execution via lethal injection in Tennessee this year alone.
Independent inquiry ordered after failed execution of Pike, who was convicted of 1994 murder Christa Pike: what we know so far about Tennessee woman’s failed execution Tennessee ’s governor on Thursday said it was “deeply disturbing” that his state botched the execution of a death row prisoner who remained alive and snoring 40 minutes…
It is a scandal that Christa Pike’s execution was botched, but we must ask whose fault that was.
‘Critically ill but not in a coma.’
Three-quarters of nations have rightly abolished capital punishment in law or practice, but killing by the state has surged in the US What is the kindest way to kill? That’s the question being asked once more following Tennessee’s failed attempts to execute Christa Pike for the brutal murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, when she was…
A look at pentobarbital reveals why the barbiturate used in Christa Gail Pike's failed lethal injection may not have reached fatal concentrations.
· United States district court judge Jeremy Fogel imposes a moratorium on lethal injections in California stating that they are unconstitutional. In an unrelated incident, the Governor of Florida Jeb Bu from the morgue, 15 Dec 2006
· John Marek becomes the 68th death row inmate in the state of Florida, United States to be executed by lethal injection since the death sentence was re-instated in 1979.(Miami Herald) from the morgue, 19 Aug 2009
· U.S. President Joe Biden commutes the death sentences of 37 out of the 44 federal death row inmates to life imprisonment. The exceptions are Dylann Roof, Robert Gregory Bowers, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, from the morgue, 23 Dec 2024
· The death penalty: 50 years after reinstatement from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· After nitrogen execution blocked, Alabama inmate to die by lethal injection from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.