Tennessee hired a prison chief with a trail of botched executions; he just delivered one more.

…(cont) Pike's own experts had told the courts what pentobarbital is: a caustic, highly alkaline chemical that burns flesh, tissue and veins on contact, the kind of warning printed on a bottle of bleach. Pike told the court her arm felt like it would burst open. The drug went in anyway, administered under the man the Times says Tennessee hired despite his Arizona record, not in ignorance of it.

Christa Pike is unconscious now, on a ventilator. Her attorneys say hospital staff were still working late Thursday to clear the pentobarbital from her system, and the attorneys have filed to preserve the execution as evidence. That filing exists because the people the state trusted to finish the job could not finish it, under the man it hired to run it.

The Times is calling this new scrutiny of Strada. The record was not new; it predates the hire. What pentobarbital does to a vein was in the court filings, in writing, before the drug went into Christa Pike's arm. The Supreme Court and a federal appeals court changed their answer on whether to proceed within the same day; the state did not change its man.