Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike on Wednesday night (PBS NewsHour). It did not work. By Thursday, her story had become something the death penalty system in this country had not produced in modern times: a woman who survived a lethal injection attempt and lived to contest what was done to her.
What happened at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville took more than two hours. Prison officials used at least seven needles in Pike’s left arm. She was breathing when they stopped. She was placed on a ventilator at a Nashville-area hospital. Governor Bill Lee, who had signed off on the execution and denied her clemency petition earlier in the week, halted all remaining scheduled executions in Tennessee and ordered a third-party investigation. NPR has followed the case from the failed procedure through the governor’s response.
The legal questions that follow from this are different from the ones that preceded it. Pike was convicted in 1996 for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. She was eighteen at the time of the crime. Her attorneys had spent years arguing, before Wednesday, that executing someone for a crime committed at that age amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Every court that considered the argument said it did not. What the courts will be asked to consider now is different: whether a state may attempt to execute someone a second time after the first attempt failed, and whether what happened in that execution chamber constituted cruel and unusual punishment in itself.
The Supreme Court has held that the state may retry a defendant after a mistrial. It has ruled on whether the state may retry an execution after a failed attempt only once, in 1947, when it allowed Louisiana to send Willie Francis back to the electric chair (Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber). The precedents are thin. The legal landscape here is new. Her attorneys called what happened “torturous.” The governor called for an investigation. The state has not said what it intends to do next. Forty people are currently on Tennessee’s death row (Tennessee Department of Correction).
The last American troops left Iraq on September 30. The withdrawal was completed at Erbil Air Base in the Kurdistan Region, where the final contingent of approximately 1,500 personnel departed. The anti-ISIS coalition headquarters moves to Jordan. American counterterrorism operations in Syria continue. The American military presence in Iraq, which had grown, shrunk, regrown, and shrunk again across multiple administrations and two decades of policy shifts, is over. NPR reported the final departure and the transition of coalition operations.
The invasion that started this began on March 20, 2003. American forces entered Iraq with the stated goal of removing a government alleged to possess weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were found. The government was removed. What followed was twenty-three years of engagement that outlasted four presidencies, the rise and partial defeat of two separate insurgencies, the emergence and territorial defeat of ISIS, and a negotiated agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw. The official American death toll from the Iraq War is 4,492 military personnel. The number of Iraqi civilians killed is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, depending on the methodology and the years counted. Both numbers are real. Neither one has a clean resting place in American public memory.
The United States deployed a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East this week, along with approximately 9,000 additional troops, as the Trump administration weighs military options against Iran. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group departed San Diego bound for the region. It joins the USS George H.W. Bush and the USS George Washington, already in the region. The Associated Press reported the carrier deployment and troop movements.
The administration cited an incident involving an airline copilot who allegedly attempted to crash an Israel-bound flight and claimed possible links to Iran. The pattern of deploying carrier groups as a signal of intent while negotiations or deliberations continue is a familiar one in American foreign policy. The Carter administration deployed the USS Nimitz to the Indian Ocean during the 1979 hostage crisis. The Clinton administration sent two carrier groups to the waters near Taiwan in 1996 (International Security). The Bush administration positioned carriers in the Persian Gulf before the Iraq invasion. A carrier group is not a declaration of war. It is a statement about options.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 7.28 percent this week, according to Freddie Mac’s weekly survey. That is a jump of 25 basis points in a single week, the largest weekly increase since October 2022, and the highest rate since November 2023. Mortgage applications fell 6 percent week over week. Freddie Mac published the data on Thursday.
The Federal Reserve has been holding rates at elevated levels in an effort to bring inflation back to its 2 percent target. Energy price pressures tied to Middle East tensions have complicated that effort. The inflation that the Fed is fighting shows up in housing costs, in car payments, in the monthly calculation that families make about whether the math of a move still makes sense. For readers working through those calculations right now, this piece on what happens when the family home starts to feel like the wrong size covers the human side of that decision, which the rate data alone doesn’t touch.
In 1981, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate peaked at 18.45 percent. People bought and sold homes that year anyway. The market contracts, adjusts, and resumes. What 7.28 percent means in 2026 depends entirely on when you bought, what you paid, and what you’re trying to do next.
South Korea abolished its state prosecution office on Friday and replaced it with two new agencies: a Prosecution Service, which will handle charging decisions, and a Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, which will handle investigations into corruption, cybercrime, and national security crimes. The old Prosecutors’ Office had existed for seventy-eight years, since 1948. The reform separates the investigative function from the charging function for the first time in South Korean legal history. Xinhua reported the transition.
South Korea’s prosecution system became politically controversial in recent years through a series of high-profile investigations of sitting officials and former presidents. The question of whether a single institution should have both the power to investigate and the power to charge has been debated in legal systems around the world. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom separate the two functions in different ways and to different degrees. Japan does not. South Korea has now joined the countries that do. These structural changes rarely announce their full consequences in the first week. They won’t here, either. What the two new agencies will do with the power they’ve been given is a story that will take years to tell.
SpaceX launched four people to the International Space Station on Thursday morning, and all four docked eight hours later. That is the fastest Crew Dragon trip to the ISS yet. The crew includes two NASA astronauts, Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, one Canadian Space Agency astronaut, Joshua Kutryk, and one Russian cosmonaut, Sergey Teteryatnikov. They’ll be up there for approximately six months. NPR covered the launch and the crew.
An American, a Canadian, and a Russian launched together from Florida on a day when the United States was sending a third aircraft carrier toward a potential confrontation with a country that borders Russia’s near abroad. The geopolitics of the moment didn’t prevent them from going. The science requires continuity of crew. The station needs people to run it. So they went, and they arrived, and somewhere 250 miles above a planet that is working through some things, four scientists from three countries are getting to work.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
