Almost a week after receiving a double shot of a lethal execution drug, Christa Pike woke up in a Nashville, Tennessee, hospital, handcuffed to a bed and, according to one of her lawyers, “angry and confused.”

Indeed, anger and confusion is pretty much where this horrifying episode leaves most of the rest of us, regardless of where we stand on the volatile issue of capital punishment.

The details of the execution attempt and its aftermath are appalling, compounded by the fact Pike’s lawyers had warned that she suffered from a blood-clotting condition that makes any intravenous injection, including a lethal one, more prone to failure.

Failure is what happened in the execution chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Sept. 30, as Pike, after the first injection, raised her head and asked a question to the officials conducting the execution.

That first, insufficient injection of pentobarbital was followed by a second one, and members of the press were horrified to observe that Pike remained “alive and loudly snoring,” according to the Associated Press, before the microphone was cut off in the execution chamber. Then she was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Believed to be brain dead last Monday and scheduled to be taken off life support, on Tuesday Pike astonishingly regained consciousness. By Thursday she had taken a few steps.

“Christa is a survivor,” said Randy Spivey, one of her attorneys. “She........

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