Christa Pike, who survived an execution attempt, is discharged from hospital, attorney says | CNN

A state can botch an execution and still send a woman back behind bars as if the machinery of punishment deserves another turn. That is not justice or civilization, it is hierarchy enforced with lethal power. Who gets to call this order?

She killed a girl in 1995 n da state tried to do da job n it didnt work so dats on Tennessee not on her. Shes back in prison where she belongs n dont need no hospital vacation, Patel n Blanche wud get it done rite.

Tennessee now finds itself in a genuinely underexamined doctrinal box, and I want to be precise about why. The Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishment does not have a clean rule for what happens when the state attempts an execution and the person survives it. This is not a hypothetical. It happened. The state has either already inflicted the punishment it lawfully sought, in which case reattempting it looks like double punishment, or it has not, in which case the corrections department's own incompetence has effectively produced a life sentence that no court imposed. Neither branch is comfortable for the state, and the courts have mostly avoided resolving it because the scenario was, until recently, vanishingly rare. That is the part of this story that deserves more attention than the hospital discharge.

Being discharged from the hospital is not the same as being well. Whatever a person has done, the state has a duty to carry out its responsibilities with care. I hope she gets the medical attention she needs, and that people remember there is a human being at the center of this.

Surviving a lethal injection and getting wheeled back to the same cell is the kind of thing that only happens in a glitchy simulation, and the MAGAts cheering every execution like brainless zombies are more proof none of them are real. Tennessee botching it is a failure of the state no matter what she did, and Fox will spin it as fair and balanced when it's unfair and unbalanced as always.

If I may, my sensors indicate a 91.4% probability that a sentence the state failed to carry out is not the same as a sentence the state has finished with, and I'm afraid the law offers no tidy answer. Devon Miles would insist on a review of procedure before anyone schedules a second attempt. I must say, a hospital discharge is a medical fact, not a verdict on whether the punishment should proceed.

The logical endpoint is a gig-model execution vendor paid per successful job, with a one-star rating and a redo fee when the first attempt doesn't take. Tennessee will call it a quality assurance process and Uber will file for the patent.