Carrie Ross, who helped raise Pike, 50, and “loves her as a daughter,” said her niece’s life should be spared because the Almighty clearly doesn’t support her execution.
Page B40From§Eachthe morning edition — 8 October 2026
Court cites woman's botched execution as reason to carry out an identical one.
As it ran on the front
The consensus that lethal injection is a humane way for a state to kill someone finished dying this week, and it died the way its defenders always said it couldn't: awake, in public, asking what had happened.
It had been sick a long time. The fifteen-year taboo on firing squads as a relic of a cruder country died first, in March of 2025, when South Carolina stood a man named Brad Sigmon against a wall at Broad River Correctional Institution and shot him. Lethal injection survived that one. It did not survive this one.…
…(cont) On September 30, Tennessee gave Christa Pike, 50, two doses of pentobarbital meant to stop her heart. It did not. By October 2, Governor Bill Lee had suspended every execution in the state and ordered an independent inquiry, and Pike was listed in critical condition. On Tuesday she woke up enough to ask her lawyers what had happened. They say the prison kept them from her for more than two hours after she did.
Eight days is still dying. This week the method's own failure became, by way of the courts, the reason to keep using it. Jamaal Howard's attorneys cited Pike's botched injection in Tennessee to argue the same pentobarbital posed the same risk in Texas. A Texas court declined to halt his execution anyway. Howard was executed this week by the identical drug.
Pike's aunt, Carrie Ross, who helped raise her and says she loves her as a daughter, has her own account of why her niece is alive: God is in control, she says, not the Department of Correction. She does not credit the governor's inquiry, or the two doses that failed to do what they were built to do. To call what happened to Christa Pike a functioning safeguard, working exactly as designed, is hogwash — and the court in Texas called it something else entirely: precedent.
Lethal injection is survived by Jamaal Howard's family, by whatever is left of the independent inquiry, and by the next name on a death warrant somewhere, waiting on the same drug.
In lieu of flowers, a public count: how many times pentobarbital has to fail before a court finds that it has.
“They're using the one woman who lived through it as the proof the drug works, instead of the warning it is, and that's not an oversight, that's the whole machine running correctly. The drug doesn't have to kill cleanly. It just has to not get stopped — and "insufficient grounds for delay" is the receipt that tells you whose job it is to be careful here, and it isn't the state's.”
“Look, the court followed the standard for a stay, which is a high bar, as it should be — you can't halt every execution in the country every time one state has a problem, that's not how precedent works. Governor Lee ordered an independent inquiry, the process is working exactly as designed — wait, did I just call a woman asking what happened "the process working"? That's not — let me rephrase that.”
Earlier in this story
- Army revives a method unused since 1945 the week lethal injection left a woman asking what happened By Mort · the early evening edition, 7 October 2026
- 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
The receipts
Christa Pike's attorneys accuse Tennessee prison officials of delaying access to their client for over two hours after she regained consciousness on Tuesday following a failed execution attempt. Skyler Henry has more.
A Texas court on Wednesday refused to halt the execution of a man who fatally shot a convenience store clerk, after his attorneys cited the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Jamaal Howard's attorneys cited Christa Pike's failed lethal injection in Tennessee to argue the pentobarbital drug posed risks, but the Supreme Court rejected it.
· Christa Pike left in ‘critical condition’ as Tennessee halts all executions from the morgue, 2 Oct 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.