Absurdity
Tennessee Executes A Woman For The First Time In 200 Years, Except It Didn't Work
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Tennessee spent two centuries working itself up to executing a woman, selected the drugs, scheduled the date, and administered two full doses of pentobarbital on September 30th, and Christa Pike, 50, is currently awake in a hospital bed talking to people.
Her attorneys confirmed Tuesday that Pike is conscious and speaking after surviving what the state had formally organized as her death. Tennessee officials have not explained why two doses of the drug used to kill people did not kill the person they administered it to, which is not a minor operational gap.
Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of a fellow University of Tennessee student, a crime so brutal that even people who oppose capital punishment tended to get quiet when the details came up. Tennessee had not executed a woman since 1820. The state had more than 200 years to get the logistics right.
Dr. Kevin Patel, a pharmacologist who was not involved in the case and has reviewed lethal injection protocols, said in a statement that pentobarbital at the standard dose "produces unconsciousness within approximately 30 seconds and cardiac arrest within minutes, in the overwhelming majority of documented cases." The phrase "overwhelming majority" is doing a lot of work in that sentence right now.
Governor Bill Lee's office released a statement calling the outcome "deeply concerning" and promising a full review of the Department of Correction's procedures, which is the administrative equivalent of a restaurant promising to look into why the food poisoned someone after the ambulance has already left.
Pike's lead attorney, Kelley Henry, said her client is "understandably disoriented" but responsive. Henry did not elaborate on what Pike said when she woke up, though it is difficult to imagine the first sentence covering anything other than what just happened to her.
The Tennessee Department of Correction has faced questions about its drug protocols before, but those questions were generally theoretical. They are now extremely specific.
What happens next is a legal question nobody in Tennessee had a form ready for. You cannot simply reschedule an execution the way you reschedule a dentist appointment, though several state officials are reportedly consulting with attorneys about exactly that, which gives you a sense of how the week is going in Nashville.
Federal courts have begun receiving filings from Pike's legal team arguing that a second attempt would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, a position that, under these particular facts, requires very little legal creativity.
Tennessee joins a short list of states that have faced botched executions, but it is believed to be the first to botch one for a woman, which is either a distinction or an indistinction, depending on your view of what equality under the law is supposed to mean.
Pike remains hospitalized. The state's execution protocol remains under review. The drugs remain unexplained. Two hundred years of buildup, and the most prepared anyone in Tennessee has ever been for something that still did not happen.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/06/christa-pike-execution-awake