The US state of Tennessee was due on Wednesday to execute 50-year-old Christa Gail Pike. Instead, after two doses of pentobarbital - the drug Tennessee uses for lethal injections - the condemned woman survived and was taken by ambulance from the prison to hospital. Her condition is not yet known.

Journalists who were witnesses describe a scene that is hard to forget. Pike was strapped to the gurney in the execution chamber. At one point she lifted her head and asked prison staff whether her arm was supposed to feel like this. The second dose had been given by 20:26 local time, and afterwards she could be heard snoring loudly behind the closed curtain. The microphone was switched off at 20:53 and the journalists were asked to leave. Prison officials at that point could not explain what had happened.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a US organisation that tracks capital punishment, there have been cases where an execution could not go ahead because of problems finding a vein. But there is no known previous case of a prisoner surviving after the execution drugs had already been administered.

And it is not the first time this year. In May Tennessee called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after the executioners failed for more than an hour to set an IV line. A state that claims the right to take a life has shown twice this year that it can't even master its own procedure. If the system can't place a needle, how sure is it about everything else it does on the way to that room?

The crime

Pike was 18 when, in January 1995 in Knoxville, together with her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and another girl, she lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area. There Slemmer was beaten and stabbed, and a pentagram was carved into her body. Prosecutors argued that Pike saw Slemmer as a rival for the boyfriend. Pike was sentenced to death, Shipp to life in prison with the possibility of parole. In recent years Pike has not denied committing the murder.

Her lawyers spent years trying to have her sentence commuted to life without parole, citing her age at the time of the crime, a difficult childhood, sexual abuse and diagnoses of bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Governor Bill Lee rejected the clemency request. A federal appeals court halted the execution about an hour before it was scheduled, but the US Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, lifted the stay the same day.

Now the lawyers are asking the courts to stop the process immediately and for Pike to receive medical care. Had the execution succeeded, she would have been the first woman Tennessee had executed in more than 200 years. Macedonia closed this question with its 1991 Constitution. In Tennessee it is still open today: if the state can't even carry out an execution by its own rules, what else is the death penalty resting on?