He expressed disbelief that Pike survived the two rounds of lethal injection, becoming the first person in history to survive that death penalty method.
Page B1From§Eachthe supper edition — 1 October 2026
Trump mourns a failed execution that left a woman critical, disappointed only that it didn't work
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 this week in the execution chamber in Nashville, and lay in state only long enough for a sitting president to ask why the body wouldn't cooperate. It survived 2006, when a California judge ruled the method unconstitutional and Florida idled its own machine after a man took 34 minutes to die. It survived 2009, when Florida executed its 68th man by injection since 1979 and logged it as proof the thing worked. It did not survive Christa Pike.
Pike was 50, an accomplice at 18 in the murder of Colleen Slemmer, and Tennessee had scheduled her to be the first woman it put to death in more than two hundred years. She received one dose of pentobarbital. She received a second. By the state's own account she was alive and critical afterward, and the governor ordered an inquiry into a method that had just failed twice in a row. Tennessee suspended its executions. The record here is modest and exact: pentobarbital lethal injection, the method itself, had not once before failed to kill the person strapped to the gurney. This week, it did.…
…(cont) U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn used the occasion to ask for the electric chair back, a chair this country agreed, decades ago, to stop calling humane. The mother of Pike's victim watched the state fail at the one task it had scheduled, and said so, plainly, in words a newspaper mostly can't print. Asked about a woman left critical by a double dose of a drug meant to be quick, he said it should be easy to do — grief, such as it was, not for Pike, not for the dead, but for a machine that had let him down. That is the bunk at the bottom of the method: not that it promised mercy and failed, but that its failure read, to the one man asked about it, as an inconvenience.
In lieu of flowers, a state that cannot make this work twice in one year might consider not doing it a third time.
“They can't carry out a killing with a syringe and the president's upset it was hard — not that a woman almost had to be put to death twice. That's the tell: it isn't about mercy, it's about whether the paperwork cleared on schedule. When "should be easy to do" is the whole moral position, your kid's school lunch account and your mom's Medicare claim are standing in the same line Christa Pike was in.”
“Look, the president's a builder, he thinks in terms of — well, not that word, skip that — he thinks in terms of delivery, and when a state-run process fails twice that's a management observation, that's all he's making. He's not making light of anyone's death, he's not making light of anything, he's asking a logistics question. Is "should be easy to do" a little cold? Maybe. Is it wrong? I mean, technically pentobarbital is a pretty simple compound, so — he's not incorrect.”
Earlier in this story
- Tennessee's humane execution method fails twice this year, still not out of pilot phase after 47 years By Mort · the early bird edition, 1 October 2026
The receipts
· Christa Pike: What to know about the case of Tennessee death row inmate from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Trump administration asks Supreme Court to OK transgender inmate policy from the morgue, 28 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.