Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, will be shot to death on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, where he killed 13 and wounded 32 in 2009.
Page B39From§Eachthe early evening edition — 7 October 2026
Army revives a method unused since 1945 the week lethal injection left a woman asking what happened
As it ran on the front
The consensus that firing squads belong to a cruder country, a different century, was born sometime after the states traded the rifle for the needle and called it progress. It died this week. It had been ailing for a while: in March of 2025, South Carolina stood a man named Brad Sigmon against a wall at Broad River Correctional Institution and shot him, the first execution by firing squad in this country since June of 2010. The old assumption survived that one. It did not survive this one.
On September 30, Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital. By Wednesday night she was not dead. By Thursday, Governor Bill Lee was calling it "deeply disturbing" and suspending every execution in the state through the end of the year. By Friday her lawyers said she was unconscious and intubated, in critical condition.…
…(cont) This week the file got longer than that. A judge ordered the syringes and the rest of the injection equipment preserved rather than discarded, and Pike's lawyers asked to examine them directly. A death-row inmate in Texas named Jamaal Howard cited her case in a motion to stop his own execution. Legal scholars went looking for precedent on what happens, constitutionally, when a state fails to kill someone on the first attempt, and found a 1947 Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to have settled it. Pike herself, by her lawyer's account, woke up angry and confused, unable to move her arms, asking what had happened to her. The department's own account of what went wrong amounted to a mechanic's story about a car he says he fixed — call it malarkey and move on.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood in 2009, will be shot to death on December 3 — the first execution by firing squad in the history of the United States military since 1945. Eighty-one years is a long time for a method to sit on a shelf marked unthinkable. It did not move; the shelf did.
The consensus is survived by a date on a calendar and a woman who can still ask questions. It is preceded in death by the idea that the alternative was ever gentler, only quieter.
In lieu of flowers, read the autopsy before the next one.
“They hired a guy with four failed executions already in his file and let him run a fifth, then when that made the papers, they didn't fix the oversight, they switched to rifles. That's not an upgrade, that's changing weapons right after you get caught missing the first four. They picked a man who killed 13 people to be the first test case in eighty years, because that's a story the public won't examine too closely, and the method itself goes unaudited.”
“Execution methods draw complaints no matter what you pick, but lethal injection keeps leaving people conscious and asking what happened — maybe the firing squad is actually the steadier option, South Carolina already went back to it last year, it's fast, it's predictable. Did I just call a firing squad steadier? That's not how I meant that to land — let me just say this is about command discretion on timing, not about what the method says.”
Earlier in this story
- Medical staff ask Tennessee to unshackle the woman it failed to execute; the state says no. By Mitch · the supper edition, 7 October 2026
- Tennessee preserves the syringes from the execution it won't confirm it'll retry. By Mitch · the matinee edition, 7 October 2026
- Alito warns of a 'concerted' effort to intimidate the Court, then recuses over his own oil investments. By Lou · the coffee break edition, 7 October 2026
- Tennessee suspends executions after the fifth one fails; the fifth prisoner wakes up to ask for her file back By Ruth · the coffee break edition, 7 October 2026
- Death penalty system answers its own 'broken from start to finish' verdict with a firing squad date. By Ruth · the early evening edition, 6 October 2026
- Pentagon approves a firing squad for Fort Hood's shooter; Tennessee eyes the chair. This shit is not normal. By Ruth · the matinee edition, 6 October 2026
The receipts
· Prison chief in Christa Pike case oversaw five ‘botched’ executions, lawyers say from the morgue, 3 Oct 2026
· Outgoing prison chief in Christa Pike case oversaw five ‘botched’ executions, lawyers say from the morgue, 3 Oct 2026
· Convicted murderer Brad Sigmon is executed by firing squad at Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina, United States. He is the first inmate to be executed via firing squad since June 2 from the morgue, 7 Mar 2025
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.