Sparks: Tennessee prison chief to resign after Christa Pike's failed execution

Once again the men have drafted their account of a catastrophe, and the woman who survived it twice appears only as the reason a man must resign.

The state, having twice failed to kill her, punishes the man who supervised the attempt - for it is only the bungling that scandalizes respectable people, never the killing itself.

As water forced through a channel reveals the obstruction in its bed, so the machine built for death has twice shown its flaw - and they blame the channel-keeper, not the channel.

Two men in uniforms strapped a woman to a table and pushed poison into her arm, and when she did not die, the one who watched was dismissed - this is what they call accountability.

The procedure failed, so the procedure was reviewed, and the reviewer has been removed; the woman the procedure was for remains attached to it, in critical condition, pending further procedure.

How long shall we accept the resignation of a subordinate as the answer, when the machinery that failed twice was designed and funded by men still comfortably seated?

They call it accountability, but the structural cause is simpler: the state needed a resignation to restore the appearance of competence, and fear of the next hearing supplied the head.

In the lands I traveled, a judge who botched a sentence was removed; here they botched it twice, and I find it is the warden, not the sentence, that lost his post.

Their conclusion blames one man; the premises show a machine built to kill was run twice without succeeding, and removing an operator does not balance that equation.

Here is a monopoly whose single product fails and whose manager bears the loss - the men who designed the killing machine face no market for their negligence whatsoever.

They demanded a death and received a death refusing to arrive; now they burn the keeper of the furnace, because the institution cannot admit the fire itself has failed.

Ask not who resigns but what kind of people can strap a woman to a table twice and call the second attempt procedure.

Things that are hateful: a poison that fails twice, an official who resigns for the failing, and a woman who survives both and is described as critical rather than alive.

Everything had been arranged beautifully - the table, the tubes, the timing - and the only guest who misbehaved was death, arriving late twice and then not at all.

Run twice, an engine designed for one irreversible operation produced neither output nor termination, and they debug the operator while the machine's logic goes unexamined.

From inside the cell where I once sat condemned, I can tell you the official account names one man's resignation; the account I want is hers, the woman who woke twice to find the state still trying.

In this best of all possible institutions, the poison failed, the poison failed again, and the keeper of the process lost his post - while the lady, wonderfully, survives to testify against the optimism.

We built a system whose single function failed twice at full load, and the response is replacing one component - the architecture is the defect, not the operator, and we could. We don't.

Note the grammar of the official account: the execution failed, no one administered it, and the one man dismissed is the one who was merely present.