Tennessee sentenced Christa Pike to death in 1996. Thirty-one years later, on September 30, 2026, the state tried to carry it out, and could not. Two doses of pentobarbital, about two hours, and she was carried from the death chamber still alive. We start there and ask the older question underneath it: when a society waits three decades and then cannot finish, is that mercy, justice, or something the Eighth Amendment was written to forbid.

This episode runs two threads. First, the women: the two who helped kill Colleen Slemmer, and a state that has not executed a woman in roughly two hundred years. Then the long view, traced only through primary sources: the warrant in Genesis, the reluctance of the Sanhedrin, Draco and Solon, Caesar and Cato arguing it out on the Senate floor, Aquinas and Augustine, Beccaria on swift and certain punishment, and the Supreme Court from Trop to Furman to Gregg to Bucklew. We close with a brief pictorial history of how the death penalty has actually been carried out, from stoning to the needle, and the uncomfortable pattern that every new method was sold as the humane one.

Chapters (times are approximate, set to the final cut)
0:00 The Botched Execution
5:00 The All-Women Executioners
11:30 The Case of Christa Pike
18:00 The Hebrew Verdict
23:30 Greece and Rome
28:30 Caesar and Cato
32:30 The Decadence Question
36:00 The Philosophical Precedent
43:00 Swift and Certain
47:30 Cruel and Unusual
53:30 Final Question
55:00 Methods of Capital Punishment
68:00 The Last Question

Primary sources
State v. Pike, 978 S.W.2d 904 (Tenn. 1998)
Genesis 9:5-6; Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5 and Makkot 1:10; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 41a
Plutarch, Life of Solon 17 (Perseus): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0063
Livy, History of Rome 10.9; Sallust, War with Catiline 51-52
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II Q.64 (New Advent): https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm
Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764)
Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958); Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972); Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976); Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019); Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015) (Breyer, J., dissenting)
Methods segment: Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes 16; Code of Hammurabi, law 153; Acte for Poysoning, 22 Henry VIII c. 9 (1531); Report of the Aberdare Committee on capital sentences (1888)

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This episode discusses capital punishment and a violent crime. It is a sensitive subject. If you are struggling, reach out to someone you trust.