NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE — The American state of Tennessee terminates the lives of condemned prisoners by lethal injection, a substance its own documents classify, with confidence, as lethal. The state has administered the substance twice to Christa Pike, a convicted murderer reported to be the only woman on the state's death row, imprisoned since 1996 for the 1995 killing of University of Tennessee student Colleen Slemmer. Ms Pike survived both administrations. She is now in hospital. The state reports that the case has raised many questions; the questions were authored largely by the state's own procedure.
The first administration produced the first non-outcome. A second administration followed; it matched the first. "The procedure was carried out in accordance with established protocol," said Dana Whitfield, Deputy Director of Communications for the Tennessee Department of Correction. "The review will determine whether the protocol itself requires adjustment." The state thus affirms both that it followed its plan and that its plan is now the object of study. The distance between briefing and event, which this desk is retained to measure, here spans exactly two administrations. By the same arithmetic, the adjective "lethal" stands at zero for two, a record the state's manual does not appear to contemplate.
"A compound either reaches its dose or it does not," said Dr. Priya Nandakumar, an anaesthesiologist at a Nashville teaching hospital who has reviewed published data on drugs used in executions. "In my field, a compound that fails twice is not called lethal. It is called a finding." Tennessee has not adopted the clinical vocabulary. Its bulletins continue to pair the word "lethal" with the word "failed" in adjacent sentences, without remarking that the second word has falsified the first.
Officials have not said whether a third attempt will be scheduled, or what the second administration was expected to achieve that the first had not. Ms Pike's sentence remains in force, which returns her, administratively, to the waiting list — the queue of the queue — for a procedure that local bulletins call an execution and this desk's index records, so far, as an attempt.
This desk closes the file as follows: adjective, deployed, two; adjective, fulfilled, zero; adjective, status, under review; patient, one, in hospital; questions, many, open.
