Pentagon approves firing squad days after the drug meant to kill Christa Pike left her alive forty minutes.

…(cont) October 2: her lawyer says she's in critical condition. The governor orders an independent inquiry into what happened.

Days after that: the man running Tennessee's prisons — the one who came in with four botched executions already on his record from his last job — resigns.

Same week: a man named Gary Wayne Sutton, on death row for killing the man who bailed him out of jail, has his December execution date put on hold. Nobody found anything new wrong with his case. The execution team just isn't trusted to run one right now.

October 6: the Pentagon approves a request to execute Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, by firing squad. First time the military's done that in decades.

That same morning, a paper out of Houston runs a piece calling the death penalty "legalized torture by the government."

That's the list.

I've got a toolbox in the garage, nothing special, a torque wrench I bought because the manual said to tighten the lug nuts to a specific number or the wheel comes off down the road. Precise tool. Does one job. When it stops reading right — and it does, eventually, they all do — I don't reach for a bigger wrench and lean on it harder. I take it in, or I replace it. The whole point of a torque wrench is that it's supposed to be exact. A sledgehammer's under the same bench. I use it for things that are already broken and need to come apart. I have never once reached for the sledgehammer because the torque wrench was reading low.

So here's what I don't follow. Tennessee's precise method — the one that's supposed to measure out exactly enough to do the job quietly, quickly, a double dose, nothing left to interpretation — didn't do the job. It did something nobody planned for, in front of witnesses, and the governor used the word "disturbing" about his own state's hand. That's this month. And this same week, a different part of the same government signs off on the blunt method. The one with no dose to calibrate. First time in decades anybody's authorized it.

The governor's statement — the one calling his own state's work disturbing — is dated October 1st. The Pentagon's approval of the firing squad is dated October 6th. Five days apart. I can hold both pieces of paper in the same hand. Which one happened first?

Which brings me to the last thing on the list, and then I really will let you go.

That piece out of Houston calls the death penalty "legalized torture by the government." I don't know what the writer was looking at when they picked that word. Could've been nothing but what happened in Tennessee this month.

Oh — one more thing, before I go. Is "torture" the word the paper in Houston reached for on its own, or is it just the plain word for a drug that's supposed to kill a person quickly instead leaving her breathing on the table long after it should have worked, while the man in charge of the state calls it "disturbing"?