Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections

Many jurisdictions (I would hope all) have laws against cruel punishment. Having to retry an execution definitely falls under that.

(Also, for many, there’s something wrong with capital punishment, to start with, but that’s a different discussion)

Perhaps this will turn into a test case that furthers Republican zeal for firing squads since presumably they are still obligated to kill her and it seems unlikely (as you point out) that a firing squad would replicate this same sort of failure, certainly not if they are also allowed two (times n firing squad members) shots at it if you'll pardon the unfortunate language.

The current administration has been quite open about its preference for firing squads. Personally, I don't find this reassuring at all but maybe that's just me. By the way, much of the US prison system is cruel and unusual in my view. I used to think prison abolition was a naive concept until I attended a talk were the speaker pointed out the same sort of conservatism was used to urge that prior abolitions, notably of slavery, were not only undesirable but almost unnatural. It seems much as Aristotle could not really conceive of a world without slaves, most people today feel prisons are simply a natural, necessary artifact of civilization. Of course, much of it is not driven by anything approaching a learned Aristotelian principle but rather a sort of vicarious satisfaction in meeting a violation with a greater violence.

The truth is the American prison system is largely barbaric. As usual the current president is less a sea change and more an unvarnished look into the prism of horrors that is the right-wing American mind.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5cp4NxZt8KMjA9Wa7?g_st=ac

Pharma would rather stick to their core competencies, such as pesticides and herbicides.

By and large I view the death penalty as anachronistic, but as long as it must exist, one gets the impression that firing squads and hangings are a hell of a lot more honest about what it really is.

Coming back in fashion? I've heard of at least two executions recently in which the condemned requested and were granted a firing squad execution.

A guillotine would also be acceptable.

She lured a classmate into the woods, slit her throat with a box cutter after torturing her for half an hour, bashed her skull open with a rock for good measure, then brought a piece of her skull to school the next day.

> I was even more of an idiot then than I am now

Do you think the above should be chalked up as normal childhood indiscretion?

My opinion, of course.

To be sure, there are crimes so heinous that the perpetrator can no longer be allowed to roam freely in society. You might even believe that, from a moral standpoint, they have forfeited their own right to life. But you still don't give the state the power to take it.

There are plenty of arguments for why you should not allow this, but, just an obvious one, in doing so you also give the state the right to take yours.

What was this murder, if not a one-woman civil war?

>Do you want your neighbors to be able to kill you?

My neighbors are always inherently capable of starting that one-man civil war with me, even when locked inside institutions specifically meant to prevent that.

Indeed, the law in the country we're talking about is very explicit about being able to own the tools to wage that civil war as a direct consequence of this fact.

Hiding from that reality has never worked for any other group; why do you think it's going to work for you?

I think for most people the intuition is something like: the state is there to protect people (in principle at least); when someone is sufficiently dangerous to others they forfeit this right and it becomes just about protecting others from them; whereupon 'vengeance' is basically permitted against them, but then this is also delegated to the state to deter people from doing it individually because that's destabilizing, hence a death penalty.

Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite. (Maybe yours is, perhaps from the catholic upbringing, which is why this doesn't make sense?)

(No idea what the neighbor thing has to do it; obviously nobody is arguing that neighbors should be (legally) able to kill anyone.)

More recently, she seems to have saved more than one life in prison.

> Jones later testified that Pike had intervened to protect other inmates before the 2001 incident. A 2025 episode of the podcast Unrestorable, which examined Pike's years in solitary confinement, reported that Jones had attempted to kill at least three other women and that Pike had intervened in each incident, including pulling one woman away from cell bars, pulling another away from a toilet, and intervening when Jones was strangling another woman with a telephone cord. In reporting on Pike's scheduled execution, WTVF-TV, republishing reporting from the Nashville Banner, reported that Jones later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.