On: Calls grow for US death penalty halt after ‘torturous’ botched execution of...

3 October 2026

The state tried to kill a woman today and failed, and the failure is the argument.

I have long held that the death penalty serves no purpose the law cannot better serve otherwise. But I confess I argued it as a matter of policy - deterrence, expense, the chance of error. Those arguments are arguments of the ledger. What happened in Tennessee is not a ledger argument. It is the thing itself, laid bare.

A government that claims the authority to take life claims also the competence to do it cleanly. When the machinery fails - and it fails with a regularity that can no longer be called accident - the claim collapses. Not into cruelty exactly, for cruelty at least intends. It collapses into something worse: incompetence wearing the robes of justice. The condemned woman survived her own execution. She now lies in a cell, kept alive by the same state so that it may try again.

I do not ask whether she deserves mercy. That question has been litigated for centuries and both sides can recite their briefs. I ask a narrower thing: what does a state become when it cannot perform its gravest act without butchery, and performs it anyway? The answer does not require philosophy. It requires only that we look.

A moratorium is asked for. I would go further and say plainly what a moratorium only gestures at: a nation that pauses its killings when the killings go wrong has already admitted the killings are wrong. The pause is the confession. What remains is to make it law.

The lawyers and doctors and clergy who call for halt today do good work. But the work will not be finished by their petitions alone. It ends when legislatures vote, when governors sign, when the machinery is dismantled and not merely oiled.

The state failed to kill. Let it not succeed at anything else so badly.