Christa Pike’s execution fails, Tennessee prisons chief to resign

The head of Tennessee’s prison system, Frank Strada, will resign this month after the failed execution of death-row inmate Christa Pike, the state’s governor, Bill Lee, announced on Saturday.

Strada, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, said his resignation is “in the best interest of the residents of Tennessee”, while an independent review is under way to determine what happened during the attempt to execute Pike.

“I believe that this review is entirely appropriate and necessary and I look forward to doing everything I can to help accurately determine what happened,” Strada said.

Pike was taken to hospital after the failed execution, where she remained unconscious and on mechanical ventilation, according to her lawyers in a court filing submitted on Friday. Medical staff worked to save her life and, by Thursday evening, were trying to remove from her body the two doses of pentobarbital, the drug the state uses for executions by lethal injection.

The failure of the execution has prompted calls for answers from both sides of the death-penalty debate. Governor Bill Lee has ordered an independent review to determine what went wrong.

Strada said he believes the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol”.

Meanwhile, Pike’s lawyers have stated that problems with the intravenous lines may have caused the pentobarbital to pass into body tissue rather than into the bloodstream.

“Apparently, at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the intravenous lines had not been placed correctly or that the veins were damaged and that the pentobarbital was, wholly or in part, entering Ms. Pike’s body,” the lawyers wrote in the court filing.

Frank Strada took over the Department of Correction in January 2023, after serving as deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.

At the end of 2024, he announced that Tennessee would change its lethal-injection protocol and would use only pentobarbital.

Christa Pike was 18 years old when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995, in a crime driven by jealousy. Pike later became one of the youngest women sentenced to death.

The attempt to execute her failed after, despite the administration of two doses of pentobarbital, Pike remained alive and was transported by ambulance to hospital.