"Trump cancels Hegseth’s plan to live-stream Fort Hood shooter’s execution/The decision is a rebuke of the defense secretary, who has remained in the president’s good graces through numerous controversies."

The headline at WaPo.

Good!

Here's Trump's Truth Social Post:

The 911 calls in the aftermath of the failed execution of Christa Pike.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New York Times (@nytimes)

 

See "Calls Show How Confusion Delayed Emergency Response for Christa Pike/The first 911 call from inside the prison was made at 8:40 p.m. It took about 30 minutes to verify its authenticity" (NYT).

"Confusion" is putting it euphemistically. How do I know the prison employees were not deliberately delaying in the hope that Pike would eventually expire?

"The initial 911 call did not come, as it might normally, from the central control at the Tennessee Department of Correction, and the caller did not have the right security verification." So who called? And why didn't someone with clear authority call? The NYT can't answer those questions because the state has secrecy laws that protect its employees who do the work of carrying out the death penalty. 

There was an execution protocol, it didn't kill Pike, and there was no protocol relating to what to do next. But that did not create the authority to kill her in some other — slower — way. 

"If Hegseth were not a musclebound intellectual void, he would know this."

"He would know that the Fort Hood killer told the mental health panel that he wanted to die. He would know his standby lawyers told the judge he was not mounting a defence because he craved the death penalty. He would know that the Greek word for 'martyr' and the Arabic 'shahid' both mean 'witness.' Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of modern jihadism, wrote that nations were built by 'the martyr’s blood and scholar’s ink.' The late al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who converted to jihadism after the hanging of a martyr in Egypt in 1966 — wrote that 'more than half the battle is fought in the media.' The great anthropologist Joe Henrich has persuasively argued that martyrdom, and the publicity secured by it, was key to the spread of early religions...."

Writes London Times columnist Matthew Syed in "America’s livestreamed execution is the ultimate gift to jihadists/The Trump administration must meet the Fort Hood killer and all terror with muscular indifference, not this gruesome circus."

"Legal experts say that Mr. Hasan could challenge the government’s decision to livestream his execution, perhaps by asserting..."

"... that a public broadcast would violate prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Courts have rejected requests from private companies that sought to broadcast executions to the public. In 2001, a federal judge refused to allow an internet company to carry a live feed of the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, citing Federal Bureau of Prisons rules that forbid recording or broadcasting executions.... But the Supreme Court has not weighed in directly on the question of whether public executions are legal, particularly when requested by the government, experts said. Public executions have been seen, including by United Nations officials, as a violation of international human rights protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...."

From "Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Could Face Challenge in Federal Courts/Legal experts say the former Army officer convicted in a 2009 mass shooting could face a narrow, rushed path to appeal a public execution by firing squad" (NYT).

"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it's public — because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things."

Said Pete Hegseth, promising a public execution.

Holy shit…

SecWar Hegseth just confirmed the Fort Hood terrorist execution will be made public for The People to see.

Not just that, but he infers we are in times similar to WW2, and that this mindset of executing traitors is here to stay.

The noticing will continue. I am…

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) October 8, 2026

So we are called to contemplate something that we have long believed to have been abandoned. There is some excitement — I see it in Hegseth's body language — over the return of the spectacle of imposing the death penalty.

There are serious writings to be read. I will begin with the letter Charles Dickens published in the London Times on November 13, 1849:

"Ms. Pike’s medical condition is likely to determine whether Tennessee officials try to execute her again."

"The U.S. Supreme Court has forbidden the execution of someone who does not have a 'rational understanding' of why they’re being put to death."

From "Christa Pike Regains Consciousness After Her Failed Execution/The death row inmate in Tennessee received two doses of a lethal injection drug last week but lived. She was taken from the execution chamber in an ambulance" (NYT).

So if the drug that was intended to kill her happened to cause enough brain damage to deprive her of "rational understanding," she gets to avoid further efforts to take her life?

"Attorneys for Christa Pike said Thursday afternoon that she is alive, in critical condition 'and receiving lifesaving medical care' after Tennessee officials tried and failed to execute her by lethal injection the previous night."

WaPo reports.

AND: Here's some speculation about how she survived (and an interesting tip on how a person can prepare in advance to stymie the lethal injection):

"Christa is a source of light in a dark place. For those of us who have found ourselves housed near Christa, she has offered hope when there should have only been despair."

Said one of Christa Pike's fellow inmates, who added that Pike "is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors [in] the beginning."

Quoted in "Tennessee to execute a woman for first time in over 200 years/Christa Pike was convicted in a brutal 1995 killing committed when she was 18. Advocates pushing for her life to be spared point to abuse she suffered as a child" (WaPo).

The death penalty requires that a jury find "aggravating factors." There were two: She tried to cover up the murder and it was "especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death."

I couldn't get Grok to tell me the details of the murder. It said "I won’t describe the attack itself or the injuries in detail. That would mean laying out the methods of a murder, which I don’t do." 

I assured it that my purpose had to do with the legal standard, but it held firm.

Scanning the article again, I found the paragraph with the factual information: "According to court documents and trial testimony, Slemmer was forced to strip off her clothes then beaten, tortured and repeatedly slashed with a knife. Pike admitted to hitting the girl in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, records show."

Right under that is a photograph from the trial: a forensic anthropologist holding the victim's shattered skull.

Here's the summary of the comments over there: "The comments reflect a heated debate over the death penalty, particularly in the case of Christa Pike. Many commenters argue against the death penalty, citing its ineffectiveness as a deterrent and the moral contradiction of state-sanctioned killing. Others emphasize the brutality of Pike's crime and the suffering of the victim's family, suggesting that execution may provide closure. Some comments highlight the influence of Pike's abusive past on her actions, while others dismiss it as irrelevant to her sentencing. Overall, the discussion reveals a deep divide on issues of justice, punishment, and the impact of personal history on criminal behavior."

ADDED: The London Times has this: "Christa Pike: ‘I have a kinship with Lindsay Clancy’/The first woman set to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years, sympathises with the mother ‘who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.’"

"I feel a kinship with Lindsay. We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues. One thing is different, however, is that times have changed a lot on awareness of women’s issues since I was put on trial. I am pleased she received a mistrial and is getting the help she needs. There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others."

Speaking of women's issues, the London Times gives us this:

"But in our conversations, he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all of this time later."

"'It cooks you,' he would repeat, folding into himself. 'It cooks you.' While the time of his trial is always within reach for Smith, the intervening decades are somewhere else, behind a curtain he won’t or can’t push aside. Smith isn’t in the habit of personal disclosure, in any case. He does not have friends in the nursing home. 'I keep to myself,' he says often. He doesn’t want to know what people were convicted of, and doesn’t ask. He says he didn’t have friends in prison either, and he isn’t exaggerating: 'Minds his own business and has no associates,' reads one behavioral report from 1964. Smith waves every question about those decades away with an impatient, 'It was prison' or 'I don’t think about that.'... Smith now spends most of his time in his room, watching TV. In conversations over the course of a year, the only person I hear him express something like friendship for is Tucker Carlson.... 'He’s my type of guy. We’re the same type,' he says, though he won’t say more.I could see it, somehow. The grievance, the paranoia, the sense that things are stacked against you."

Wrote Annalisa Quinn, in 2022 in the Boston Globe, "Frank Smith was locked up for eight decades. At 98, what would it mean to be free? Likely the longest-serving prisoner in America, he’s been paroled into a Connecticut nursing home. But he’s still not out."

That article is linked in this NYT obituary from a few days ago, "Frank Smith, Who Served 70 Years for Murder, Dies at 101/One of the longest-serving prisoners in American history, he was sent to death row in 1950 before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment."

The Times obit doesn't mention Smith's affinity for Tucker Carlson... perhaps to maintain the Times reader's empathy for the ancient convict.

I hadn't used my "deeply" tag since last May.

It's a deeply bloggy tag, so it makes me want to do a post collecting recent iterations of "deeply." The first time I used it — in "Deeply... it's such a poser word" — I had a 12-point list. That was back in 2014. Let's see what "deeply" has been doing lately.

1. "The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed/As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames" by Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic, published today. Gift link. "But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?"

2. "UN rips ‘deeply troubling’ Iran for executing at least 56 people since start of war: ‘Has no place in our world'" — published today in The New York Post. "Several people were executed in the last two weeks alone, including a 19-year-old charged with 'enmity against god' for allegedly partaking in January’s protests. Two others arrested during the protests were also executed. And in July, two people were executed out of a group of 12 convicted of 'corruption on Earth' and 'enmity against God' over connections to four police killed in January."

3. "Ken Jennings Says He Cares 'More Deeply' About Trans Rights Than Any Other Issue" (Them, August 3, 2026). "Ken Jennings... recently got into a relatively minor back-and-forth on Bluesky with people who claimed his subscriptions to the New York Times were supporting an anti-transgender media organization.... Would I subscribe to the New York Times? No. Would I unfriend someone who did? Not necessarily.... Do I do the crossword puzzle? Yes, because nothing else quiets the anxiety I feel about living in our current reality quite like trying to find a five-letter word for boredom. Ah, 'ennui,' my old friend."

4. "The Woody Guthrie story you’ve probably never heard is deeply Jewish/A documentary recasts the folk singer’s legacy through the influence of his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 3, 2026). "The film ['Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie'] makes the case that Guthrie’s extended Jewish family was not incidental but integral in his artistic and personal evolution. It is a story that stretches from Oklahoma to Coney Island to the Yiddish literary world, and from the folk revival’s Jewish impresarios to one remarkable immigrant woman whose influence has largely gone unrecognized."

5. "Neil Shubin on Trusted Science in a ‘Deeply Partisan Age’/An eminent fossil hunter takes the reins at the National Academy of Sciences in a turbulent moment for American researchers" (NYT, June 2026). "As an institution, we are — by charter and design and history — nonpartisan. But we are in a deeply partisan age. Just by doing our work, we will be viewed in a partisan light no matter what. So our job is to double down on the science. We need to be a trusted source of data."

6. "'I Deeply Believe Dogs Have Superpowers and Secrets’/Prompted by a fierce attachment to his own pet, Paul Yoon wrote a harrowing yet hopeful novel, set during wartime, told from a canine perspective" (NYT, August 2, 2026). "Like his finest literary forebears who have written from a dog’s perspective — Virginia Woolf ('Flush'), John Berger ('King: A Street Story'), Jack London ('Call of the Wild') — Yoon pulls it off without being treacly or condescending.... It helps that Etna can understand everything that’s said by people around him. This was partly a practical choice, as Yoon explains: 'I wanted to create a bridge for the reader to experience this world and this journey.' But, he added, 'I deeply believe dogs have superpowers and secrets.'"

7. "The Deeply Human, Complexly Queer Animated Animals of 'Bouchra'" (autostraddle, August 3, 2026). "In Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s bold film Bouchra, an NYC‑based lesbian filmmaker... tries to process her relationship with her Moroccan mother through a semi‑autobiographical meta‑fictional drama stemming from a coming‑out letter she sent nine years prior.... It’s told via anthropomorphic animals in a hyperrealized backdrop.... [E]ntirely animated in Blender, Bouchra’s experimental animal‑filled approach takes some getting used to."

"Tennessee bars journalists from witnessing the intravenous line insertion process, the first major step of the lethal injection protocol."

"I noted the time we entered the chamber. After about seven minutes of searching for a vein, they were able to insert an IV into his right arm. Then, following protocol, they also tried to set an IV in his left arm. That failed, so they moved on to his left hand, poking him over and over again. Cycling through needles, the executioners communicated mostly through tense glances and head shakes.... About 30 minutes in, a doctor entered and... told the executioners to remove Mr. Carruthers’s socks and search for veins in his feet.... After that didn’t work, the doctor asked whether anyone in the room knew how to gain access to Mr. Carruthers’s jugular vein. Then, the doctor decided to attempt to establish a central line... puncturing the neck, chest or groin.... Eventually, the doctor said he was not able to set a central line.... By then, an hour had passed. Still, the execution team continued probing his body for another access point....The state’s constructed illusion of precision had collapsed, revealing something far more chaotic and brutal...."

Writes Maria DeLiberato, in "In a Tennessee Execution Chamber, I Saw Chaos" (NYT).

The chaos ended because the governor acted, delaying the execution for another year. It's already been a long time. Carruthers was sentenced to death in 1996. 

"The British wife of a death row prisoner screamed 'I love you' as her husband was executed in Texas last night...."

"James Broadnax, 37, protested his innocence in his dying moments, saying 'Texas got it wrong,' as his wife, Tiana, spread her arms against the execution chamber window and had to be helped out of the room. 'My husband suffered so bad from the lethal injection that he had a nose bleed and bruising on his neck,' said Tiana, 31, on TikTok. 'I’m going to expose everyone. The fight didn’t end here, it got worse. You killed Mr Broadnax, but you ain’t killed MRS BROADNAX.'"

From "James Broadnax’s British wife shouts ‘I love you’ as he is executed/Death row inmate who had been convicted of double murder died by lethal injection in Texas even after his cousin had confessed to being the killer" (London Times).

Tiana met Broadnax after finding his story on the website writeaprisoner.com and writing to him. She married him 2 weeks before his scheduled execution and never touched him. She did use an old T-shirt of his to experience his smell.

Trump answers the question "Did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Jr. is gay?"

"They did say that. I think a lot of people are saying that, which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country. I sort of have to smile to myself when I see people trying to defend the Palestinian regime for women — women for Palestine — but they kill women if... you don't wear a certain cloth all over your face, you have no chance of living. When I look at gays for Palestine  — but they kill gays. The kill 'em instantly. They throw 'em off buildings. And I'm saying, who are the gays for Palestine? They have a significant amount of gays for Palestine. Now... you know, I did very well with the gay vote, okay? I even played the gay national anthem as my walk-off, okay? And I think it probably helped me, but I did great. No Republican has ever gotten the gay vote like I did and I'm very proud of it, I think it's great. Perhaps it is because I'm from New York City, I don't know. But the gay national anthem was my walk-off and I think it probably — but think of it, gays for Palestine, but they kill gays in Palestine. So when they hear that I think probably we can talk about it but it shouldn't be too hard."

If you like Trump answers that contain miscellaneous material, this episode of "The Five" is a feast. If Trump's weave makes you anxious/angry/insane, buckle in.

"By protecting the lives of preborn children with the same laws that protect people who are born, we are simply loving our neighbors in the womb as ourselves."

Said Southern Baptist Convention President Clint Pressley, quoted in "TN bill would allow death penalty for women who have an abortion/Tennessee has some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. The Human Life Protection Act prohibits all abortions from fertilization, without exceptions for rape or incest" (The Tennesseean).

Two Tennessee Republicans are seeking to impose the death penalty on women who have abortions, requiring the same penalties for women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” as defendants charged with homicide.... The bill specifically removes legal protections for pregnant women currently in statute, and classifies harm done to an unborn child as equal to assault on a person "born alive."

It would not apply to “a spontaneous miscarriage,” or to “unintentional death of an unborn child” after “undertaking life-saving procedures” to save the life of the mother and “to save the life of the unborn child.” No other exceptions are specified in the amendment text....

Imagine an oral argument in our current Supreme Court on the question whether the death penalty for abortion is cruel and unusual punishment. I suspect you'll want to say it will never come to that. 

Hangings.

Yesterday, I was reading the Nicholson Baker essay "The History of Punctuation" (in "The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber" (commission earned)), when I came across a passage about John Lennard’s "But I Digress," which is, we are told, "gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in 'Let Him Dangle' figures in a late chapter.)"

I would buy "But I Digress" so I could quote the part about "Let Him Dangle," but though Amazon shows 13 Kindle books titled "But I Digress," none are by John Lennard. I did find a hardback edition, but it's $239.00 and out of stock. So I can't tell you precisely what it has to say about the parentheses. 

So here's Elvis, doing his song, which is about Derek Bentley, who did dangle (for having uttered the ambiguous words "Let him have it"):

Did you notice the parentheses? It's a song! We'll have to look up the lyrics. The parentheses are in the bridge:

"Forced to marry her cousin at 12, Kouhkan became pregnant at 13 and gave birth to a son. She suffered physical and emotional abuse..."

"... for years. On the day her husband was killed, Kouhkan found him beating their son, then aged five. She called her husband’s cousin, Mohammad Abil, for help. When he arrived a fight broke out which resulted in the death of her husband...."

From "Child bride spared execution in Iran after blood money is paid/Guardian story helped to draw attention to planned hanging of Goli Kouhkan over death of abusive husband" (The Guardian).

"Iran executes the highest number of women in the world, according to available data. Amnesty International said that at least 30 women were executed in the country last year. At least 42 women have been executed in 2025 so far – 18 for murdering their husbands, including two child brides, according to Iran Human Rights."

"Grover Cleveland... was most easily roused to wrath when someone was misquoting Tennyson. There was thus some irony..."

"... when, in later years, Cleveland's political opponents dubbed him 'The Buffalo Hangman,' both because the label could have boomeranged in his favor and because it masked the fact that Cleveland was an especially faint-hearted executioner.... And yet he didn't have to do it...."

My son Chris reads biographies of the American Presidents and sometimes texts me photographs of striking passages.

This comes from "A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland" (commission earned):

"Mr. Boyd had chosen the nitrogen method over lethal injection in 2018, when prisoners were given a month to choose. But..."

"... he later challenged its use, arguing earlier this year in court that the method was cruel and that the state’s protocol was inadequate.... Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist in Alabama who witnessed the execution, said he counted Mr. Boyd gasp for air more than 225 times before he was pronounced dead.... [Dissenting in the Supreme Court case], Justice Sotomayor urged people to open the stopwatch app on their phone and run it until it reached four minutes. 'Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating,' she wrote. 'You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas.'"

From "Lengthy Execution by Nitrogen Gas in Alabama Renews Concerns Over Method/Anthony Boyd was the eighth person executed by nitrogen gas since Alabama began using the method last year. His execution came over the strenuous objection of three liberal Supreme Court justices" (NYT)

Boyd, in his last words, insisted that he was innocent. The victim died "bound and taped to a park bench... doused... in gasoline and lit... on fire." 

"But I think the meta text of why it was so shocking was all of the people that were waved off as conspiracy theorists. Right wing fever swamp people were completely right."

"Were a hundred percent right. They were completely right. And the people who, you know, even now, you know, you still hope they're telling the truth. Like maybe we can trust some of what they say they were this profoundly wrong. I think that is like the, the deeper layer of the shock."

Says Bari Weiss, somewhat babblingly. 

Jake Tapper, who has more reason to babble, speaks eloquently:

"Is there footage of this thing gasping for breath for two minutes before expiring? I need some light comedy before bed."

Says one commenter on "SC cop killer Mikal Mahdi chose upscale final meal before he was executed by firing squad" (NY Post).

And there is this, from Mahdi's lawyer: "Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi had chosen the lesser of the three evils.... Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering the lingering death on the lethal injection gurney."

Having given you 2 sides of the death penalty issue, I will take the liberty to turn the topic to grammar — the lawyer's grammar. You shouldn't say "the lesser of three evils." It's correct to say "the lesser of 2 evils," but "lesser" is used when there are only 2 things. If there are more than 2, you've got to use "least" — "the least of 3 evils."

That "the lesser of 2 evils" is a very common phrase and "the least/lesser of 3 evils" feels new is evidence of our tendency to see our choices as binary.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: