October 7, 2026

Photo credit: © Tennessee Department of Correction/ZUMA Press Wire/ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Last week, Christa Pike was supposed to be put to death for murdering Colleen Slemmer more than 30 years ago. But Pike survived a lethal dose of pentobarbital after the IV was allegedly misplaced. Pike is reportedly unconscious.

For some, Tennessee’s botched execution of Pike illustrates the “obscenity” of capital punishment. Because the attempt to put Pike to death was unpleasant, the thinking goes, the death penalty should be abolished altogether.

“Yet no law stipulates that executions must be pleasant,” Charles Fain Lehman points out. “The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ does not, the Supreme Court has written, preclude capital punishment (a method of punishment explicitly contemplated by the Fifth Amendment).” And it doesn’t mandate states to make executions gentle, either.

Indeed, laws in more than half of U.S. states allow capital punishment for murders that are particularly heinous. And the killing of Colleen Slemmer was exactly that. “The fact that Tennessee couldn’t put Slemmer’s killer to death does not obviate its duty to do so,” Lehman writes. “That’s what Christa Pike’s execution is about: not a referendum on the merits of the death penalty but the obligation to see justice done.”

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Last month, Bo French, a Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, posted on X about a group of Indian-American students who were cheering for the University of Texas football team. He said the students represented “a problem.”

His post was a gift to both the racialist Left and the racialist Right, Christopher F. Rufo writes. The Left has tried to convince Indian Americans that they’re an oppressed group, while the Right “insists that people of Indian descent are an eternal Other who will never become Americans.”

“We should use tests to identify natural talent, reward those who work hard, and judge individuals without regard to race,” Rufo writes. “But this does not mean that we should accept a Chinese-style regime of educational formation, high-stakes testing culture, and state-managed life trajectories as a superior ‘meritocracy.’”

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America is addressing homelessness much more effectively than just five years ago. For decades, cities assumed that only permanently subsidized housing could fix the problem. But blue-state Democrats have increasingly embraced publicly funded residential programs, which get people off the street and come with behavioral expectations. Now, as officials ramp up enforcement, the number of tents and mass encampments in major cities is down.

But we still have a long way to go, Stephen Eide warns, and what comes next will depend on how much voters care about the issue, and how the Democratic Party fares in the midterm elections. “If Democrats score decisive wins in the midterms, homelessness will become one front in the struggle between the party’s center-left and far-left wings,” he writes.

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In 2020, Oregon voters approved Measure 110, which decriminalized drug possession. Consumption and overdoses increased, and rising crime soon followed, worsened when officials cut the police bureau’s budget by $15 million.

Then, in 2024, the Oregon legislature reversed the measure, and last year, Nathan Vasquez, a tough-on-crime prosecutor, took over as Multnomah County district attorney. Crime has since returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Portland is still synonymous with urban disorder, however. The city struggles to get its rampant drug problem under control, with enforcement and arrests still lower than in previous years. Adam Lehodey recently visited and saw sidewalks filled with tents and hunched-over drug addicts, and he observed a woman stealing from a CVS.

“Portland’s resource-constrained police bureau must contend with an environment abundant in conditions that produce crime: drug addiction, homelessness, and a sense that one can get away with it,” Lehodey writes. Read more about where the city went wrong, and what it can do to turn things around.