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The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

Related:

• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• The real harm of a public execution

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Today’s News

1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
3. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

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• Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
• The Books Briefing: Don’t listen to the romantasy haters, Talya Zax writes. The best-selling genre is more than just smut.

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Evening Read

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.

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Watch. Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes (out now in theaters) is a captivating study of self-perception, David Sims writes.

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Play our daily crossword.

PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.