by John Pfaff | Oct 2, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion
On Wednesday evening, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike for a brutal murder she committed, with two accomplices, in 1995. In what Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called “unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” officials failed to execute Pike despite administering the execution drug, pentobarbital, twice. Exactly what happened is unclear, since officials repeatedly curtained off the witnesses, but her lawyers say she is now hospitalized, her condition unknown.
The next day, Gov. Bill Lee suspended all Tennessee executions for the rest of 2026, his second statewide moratorium over how executions are administered. That makes him the second Republican governor to do so, after Ohio’s Mike DeWine, who has suspended executions since 2019 over a different drug, midazolam (which also prompted Lee’s first moratorium, in 2022).
The suspension, however, does not mean Pike will not be executed. It just delays her killing by the state.
In short, anyone bothered by Tennessee repeatedly trying to execute Pike will find no help from the Supreme Court.
That might shock those who think repeatedly trying to execute someone should violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But in 1947, in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, the Supreme Court held that repeated attempts do not necessarily violate the Eighth Amendment, at least as long as the errors are in “good faith” or reflect sincere mistakes; intentionally dragging out the process to torture or prolong pain could still be impermissible.
That last part could open another argument against trying to execute Pike again.
Pentobarbital is quite controversial: the Biden administration banned it in federal executions
by The Associated Press | Oct 1, 2026 | Civil Rights, News
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Christa Pike remained alive Thursday, a day after she survived a failed attempt to execute her for the 1995 murder of a woman, one of her lawyers said.
Lawyer Randy Pivey said Pike is being treated at a hospital, but that he and the rest of her legal team didn’t know her condition.
“Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” Spivey said during a news conference. “But we know she is alive right now and receiving live-saving medical care.”
Pivey said the failed execution amounted to “torture,” and he called for her death sentence to be commuted.
The state tried to execute her by lethal injection on Wednesday, but neither the initial nor backup dose of pentobarbital killed her and she was still snoring when the execution chamber’s microphone was cut off more than an hour into the attempt. She was later taken to a hospital for treatment.
Afterward, Gov. Bill Lee indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and Tennessee’s lone remaining one that had been scheduled for this year. He also ordered a review of what happened, calling it “deeply disturbing.”
Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for a murder she committed at age 18. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
An appeals court stopped the lethal injection an hour before it was scheduled to begin, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that stay hours later.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee officials haven’t explained yet what went wrong during the failed
by Keturah Kendrick | Sep 24, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion
It has been almost four days and I’m still experiencing restless sleep after reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay in The New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Trained as an English teacher in New York City, I’m a Black woman who taught for 10 years at a school similar in all ways but one to the middle school where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter. Hannah-Jones’ bright, ambitious teenager accused her mother of intentionally sending her to “a bad school” when her class privilege could have bought better options.
I taught at a school founded by a white woman philanthropist who wanted to give students who lived north of 96th Street in Manhattan the “same” educational opportunities her own children had. Her privilege brought with it funding and resources that other schools in our district struggled to access. Although I taught mostly in the middle school, I joined my high school colleagues in boasting of our 100% high school graduation rate and 100% college acceptance rate. We knew we were doing great work. We also knew we were an exception to the many schools failing Black and brown students across all five boroughs.
We knew we were doing great work. We also knew we were an exception to the many schools failing Black and brown students across all five boroughs.
At the heart of Hannah-Jones’ essay is a mother with a long, distinguished history of writing about school segregation and how it operates, trying to articulate the deep, relentless and intentional segregation of New York City public schools — and who wanted to protect her daughter from the social
by Jordan Rubin | Sep 22, 2026 | Civil Rights, Deadline: Legal Blog, News, Science
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday declined to intervene in a contentious surrogacy and custody dispute, rejecting an emergency application from surrogate McKenna West, who asked the high court to halt a California court order that backed the child’s biological parents.
The denial is the latest in a series of legal wins for the biological parents and losses for West. Tuesday’s order declined to provide her with what the parents said would have been a chaotic, confusing and needless judicial intervention.
As is typical for such orders, there was no explanation accompanying the denial from Kagan, who is assigned to field emergency litigation from California.
West gave birth in August to the child at the center of the dispute. The Alaska woman did so in Texas, which bans abortion. She said the California couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, pressured her to have one after learning that the baby faced a life-threatening heart condition.
The surrogate argued at the Supreme Court that the California court order backing the couple’s parental rights violated her due process rights because, she said, the state court didn’t have jurisdiction over her. Among the firms representing her was Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal group that has had success at the high court.
The parents opposed West’s application on both the facts and the law. In their partially redacted response, they said there was no emergency to resolve because they had been providing the care that West said she wanted. They said they had been with the child, whom they named Rumi, “around-the-clock in a hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit,” and so, they said, Supreme Court intervention would
by Ray Brescia | Sep 22, 2026 | Civil Rights, Opinion, White House
During a testy press conference the day after the 2018 midterms, Jim Acosta of CNN asked President Donald Trump about a supposed migrant caravan heading to the United States, as alleged by Republicans and their media boosters in the weeks leading up to the elections. The migrant caravan never materialized, and reports about it quickly faded after the elections. Republicans lost decisively in the House’s midterm elections, though they retained control of the Senate.
The White House, however, said it was revoking Acosta’s press credentials and access to the White House briefing room. CNN sued over the retaliatory actions, claiming the efforts to revoke his access violated free speech and due process rights. CNN quickly prevailed, and the case was ultimately settled, with the White House restoring Acosta’s access.
While the attacks on otherwise free institutions might each look somewhat distinct, the institutions have largely taken two different paths in response. Some have fought back, while others have sought the route of appeasement.
Trump, now six weeks from another midterm election that sees his party’s control of both houses of Congress at risk, has picked another fight with the press. On Friday afternoon, he issued a post on his social media site stating that he was revoking the White House credentials of reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW, and on Saturday morning those outlets were denied access to the White House, their reporters’ credentials revoked. These news organizations have now filed a new lawsuit, asserting that the administration’s actions violate the First Amendment and the organizations’ due process rights. And their case is before the same judge who decided the Acosta case.
by Ebony Davis | Sep 22, 2026 | Civil Rights, News
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by Stefan Passantino, a former lawyer for onetime White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, against MS NOW legal analyst and law professor Andrew Weissmann.
In a 15-page order, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan granted Weissmann’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in the case Passantino brought over based on a September 2023 social media post in which the legal analyst suggested Passantino “coached [Hutchinson] to lie” during her closed-door depositions before the House Jan. 6 committee.
AliKhan ruled that Passantino failed to show that Weissmann was negligent because Hutchinson’s testimony gave Weissmann reasonable grounds to say Passantino had “coached” her to lie.
The ruling effectively ends the lawsuit in federal district court.
Weissmann and a spokesperson for Passantino did not immediately respond to requests for comment from MS NOW on Monday.
Passantino, who served as a senior lawyer in the first Trump administration, represented Hutchinson during her first three closed-door interviews with the Jan. 6 committee. Hutchinson later changed attorneys and provided additional testimony to investigators about her interactions with Passantino. She became well-known after her testimony at a televised Jan. 6 committee hearing in June 2022.
Hutchinson told the committee that Passantino had never explicitly instructed her to lie and had told her not to lie. But she also testified that he advised her that saying she did not recall certain events was an acceptable response and that “the less you remember, the better.”
The Jan. 6 committee later said it had obtained evidence that a lawyer advised a witness she could claim not to remember facts she actually recalled. Multiple news organizations subsequently identified Passantino as
