At 20:26 local time, Christa Pike was injected with both doses. According to her lawyers, she didn't lose consciousness and her heart kept beating. The curtains in front of the execution chamber were drawn twice. Journalists who witnessed it say they heard her complain of pain and saw her move her legs several times, pushing off the sheet that covered her. A few minutes earlier, according to reports, she had said she would leave the world the way she had lived - loving - and that this was a happy day for her. Instead of the end - a ride to hospital.

Pike, 50, was supposed to be the first woman executed in the US state of Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead, Governor Bill Lee ordered a "comprehensive review" to establish what had happened and announced that the state's last execution planned for this year would not go ahead. The state, for its part, insists it followed "every step of the legal, established execution protocol". The condemned woman's lawyers reply that Tennessee "once again failed to carry out a lawful execution". The Department of Correction confirmed she had been taken for treatment, but there is no information yet on her condition.

The crime is not in dispute

This isn't a story about an innocent woman. Pike was sentenced to death at just 18 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. According to police, she and two accomplices lured Slemmer to an abandoned power plant, where they tortured and beat her to death. Pike doesn't dispute her role. Her lawyers argue that the jury never heard about the years of physical and sexual abuse she suffered as a child, and that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The governor rejected her clemency request, and the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution after an appeals court had temporarily halted it.

A second failure in one year

This is Tennessee's second failed execution attempt this year alone. In May, the execution of Tony Carruthers was postponed after the executioners couldn't find a vein. When a state twice in one year can't carry out what it itself calls a precise and lawful protocol, Pike's guilt stops being the main story. The state itself is under the microscope - along with what happens in that room.

America has seen this scene before. In Alabama, Kenneth Smith survived a failed lethal injection in 2022, only to be executed with nitrogen in 2024. Whether a similar fate awaits Pike, nobody is saying for now.

From this side of the Atlantic, all of this feels almost unreal. Macedonia has had no death penalty since its 1991 Constitution, and abolishing it is a condition for EU membership. In the US, the debate long ago shifted from whether the state may kill to whether it knows how. What does it say about a system when a "successful execution" has become the measure of quality?