Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike on Sept. 30. It didn't work.

Prison staff gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital, the drug used for lethal injections. She kept breathing. An Associated Press reporter in the witness room said she could still be heard "loudly snoring, clearly very alive." She was rushed to the hospital, regained consciousness about a week later, and on Oct. 10 was sent back to the women's prison where she has spent the last three decades. Gov. Bill Lee canceled Tennessee's remaining executions for the year and ordered a third-party review of what went wrong.

Nobody disputes what Pike did. In 1995, when she was 18, she and her boyfriend attacked a 19-year-old Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. Slemmer was beaten and cut with a meat cleaver and a box cutter for somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Pike was sentenced to death in 1996, at 20.

What made this national news, beyond the failed injection, is that Pike is a woman. Had the drugs worked, she would have been the first woman Tennessee executed in roughly 200 years. Of the approximately 2,000 people on death row across the country, 45 are women--about 2.2 percent.

The pattern holds well beyond death row. At the end of 2023, state and federal prisons held 1,254,200 people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Of those, 91,100 were women, around 7 percent. The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group that........

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