How Botched Executions Were Handled in Centuries Past

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The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote , it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year.

The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s.

Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned.

She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested.

Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide.

Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public.

She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students).

Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin.

The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused.

Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock , the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me.