Christa Pike, the one woman on death row in Tennessee, survived an attempt to execute her on 30 September. Staff gave her two doses of the execution drug pentobarbital, her legal team said. She kept breathing. Robin Maher, who tracks US executions, told the Associated Press no prisoner had outlived the drugs.
A retry depends partly on precedent, or past rulings. The leading one, from Ohio in 2016, let officials retry Romell Broom because his failed lethal injection put no drugs in him. Pike got both doses, so under Ohio's double-jeopardy test, the ban on punishing someone twice would apply. That test binds no other state.
