Tennessee corrections commissioner Strada resigns after failed Pike execution

Christa Pike remains on ventilator after surviving execution attempt

Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is resigning in the aftermath of the failed execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, Governor Bill Lee announced Saturday. Strada’s departure will take effect later this month as the state launches an independent investigation into what went wrong during Wednesday’s procedure, which made Pike the first death row prisoner in the United States to undergo a lethal-injection execution attempt and survive.

In his resignation statement, Strada defended the department’s conduct while endorsing the independent review. “Serving as commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction has been a great honor, and I continue to believe the department carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol,” Strada said. “Even so, stepping aside is in the best interest of Tennesseans as the independent review moves forward. I believe this review is entirely appropriate and necessary, and I look forward to doing everything I can to help determine exactly what occurred.”

Pike, 50, was injected with lethal drugs on Wednesday but did not die. As of Friday, court filings submitted by her attorneys said, Pike remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital, with hospital personnel trying to save her life and, as of late Thursday, working to clear the two doses of the execution drug from her system.

Pike’s legal team condemned the execution attempt. Her attorney Randy Spivey, who witnessed the procedure from inside the death chamber, described what happened as “cruel and torturous.” Spivey said he personally counted seven needles inserted into Pike’s left arm, “one of which appeared to be bent when it was pulled from her.” Pike’s attorneys have alleged that complications involving intravenous lines caused the drug pentobarbital to enter her body rather than her bloodstream.

Attorneys for death row prisoners have alleged that the failed injection was the fifth “botched” execution carried out under Strada’s leadership in two states since 2022, the Guardian reported Saturday, hours before Strada’s resignation was announced. Kit Thomas, a death row attorney in the federal public defender’s office in Nashville, said Strada’s resignation did not address what she characterized as Tennessee’s broader secrecy around its execution procedures. “Frank Strada’s resignation does not change the fact that Tennessee is shrouding its executions in secrecy,” Thomas said in a statement. “When Governor Lee hired Strada to fix execution problems in Tennessee his problematic history of executions in Arizona was well known. Strada then oversaw the implementation of a new protocol that ignored the recommendations of the independent investigation and weakened protections leading to a string of problems in Tennessee, including this week’s horrific botched execution attempt and another one in May. Until there is transparency and accountability, botched executions will keep happening.”

Governor Lee has paused the scheduling of executions in Tennessee and ordered an independent review. The breakdown inside Tennessee’s execution chamber has triggered demands for an explanation from people on both sides of the death-penalty debate.

Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of her teenage classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, killed Slemmer at a job training camp in Knoxville. A pentagram had been carved into Slemmer’s chest. After the murder, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, her attorneys said. In an earlier petition for clemency, Pike said: “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

Had Wednesday’s execution succeeded, Pike would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The Associated Press contributed reporting.