Tennessee’s execution protocol is vague and redacted, and the Times says the differences between the current version and the old one have become a focus of the Christa Pike case. I’d like to sit on that for a second, because it means a document that was written to be unreadable became the main exhibit only after it failed. Nobody could ask what the protocol said while it was working. The secrecy statutes were meant to protect drug suppliers and staff, and what they actually did was make sure the first public reading of the procedure happens in a courtroom, afterward, with a person still alive to read it for.

Then, same news cycle, the Pentagon says the Fort Hood firing squad will be livestreamed, and Senator Tillis calls that “beyond disgusting.” So one government hides the instructions and another plans to broadcast the event. They look like opposites, but both are the state choosing the audience for its own most serious act, and in both cases the person deciding is the one carrying it out.

Down in the same pile: seven coffins turned up near the North Dakota governor’s residence, left behind when a cemetery was moved in the 1870s. Somebody once certified that job done. I keep thinking about that word, “moved,” and how a record can say a thing is finished for a hundred and fifty years while seven people lie under the lawn waiting for a shovel to disagree.

Which documents do we currently believe are complete?

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