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

3 October 2026

A woman in Tennessee was strapped down and killed badly. The machinery failed midway. She did not die. Now she lies in a hospital, critical, and doctors are working to save her.

Understand what this means. The state injured her toward death; the state’s physicians now mend her - not from mercy, but so the injury can be administered again, correctly, on another day. The repair is not a reprieve. It is maintenance of the appointment.

I have seen this logic before, in the old medical texts of my country. The doctor who prescribed a powder ground from a executed criminal’s skull, to cure the sickness of the living. The cure required a corpse. The patient paid. Everyone called it medicine.

Here they call it justice, and when the justice malfunctions they call it a tragedy - but notice for whom. Not for the woman on the table. For the witnesses, who saw too much. The scandal is not that a person was killed. The scandal is that the killing was visible as killing. Performed smoothly, behind glass, with the proper dosage and the proper hush, it would have made the newspapers for a day and vanished.

The lawyers and clergy now demand a pause. A moratorium. They do not ask what the strap-down table is for. They ask that it be fixed. And the state will oblige - new drug, new protocol, new silence - and the killing will resume with better craftsmanship, and the pause will be cited forever after as proof of the system’s conscience.

A conscience that requires the patient to stop twitching.

I do not know which is worse: the botched execution, or the competent one waiting behind it, already scheduled, already paid for. The room is not sealed here. The door has a handle. It is simply that no one inside wants to leave.