Tennessee corrections commissioner Strada to resign amid execution fallout
A former attorney for Christa Pike said he was not surprised that Tennessee’s attempt to execute her failed, because defense filings had warned that problems accessing her veins could make the procedure “difficult and perhaps cruel.”
James Crowson, who represented Pike during part of her post-conviction appeals while working for the Tennessee Post-Conviction Defender, said the failed execution on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville reflected the exact risks her lawyers had flagged. Pike, 50, remained hospitalized and on a ventilator as of Sunday, according to Stephen Ferrell, an assistant federal defender now representing her, who described her condition on CNN’s State of the Union.
“She’s still in the hospital, on a ventilator, critically ill — we don’t really know the prognosis yet and may not know for several days,” Ferrell told host Jake Tapper. Ferrell said he had not been able to personally see Pike and added: “this is the extent of what we know.”
Pike’s attorneys allege that improperly placed intravenous lines allowed the pentobarbital with which she was injected to enter tissue rather than her bloodstream, leaving both arms severely injured. The Tennessee Department of Correction has maintained that it followed every step of the state’s lawful execution protocol. The department said the protocol did not permit additional procedures after the steps carried out on Wednesday.
Crowson said those accounts are not necessarily contradictory. “The state comes up with a protocol and, typically, states that are inclined to impose the death penalty don’t really include medicine or science in the discussions when they’re coming up with these protocols,” he said. Crowson said the reported injuries appeared consistent with the concerns his team had raised, citing the theory that the drug entered surrounding tissue instead of circulating properly through Pike’s bloodstream.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. Pike was 18 at the time. Her then-boyfriend and co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and ineligible for the death penalty; he received a sentence of life imprisonment.
Crowson said that gap in punishment, based on a small age difference, illustrates what he views as the capricious nature of capital punishment. “She’s a few months older than the young man that was engaged in the same conduct, and she’s been fighting for her life now for 32 years,” Crowson said. “He’s still in prison, but hasn’t been subjected to the death penalty.” He said the age of 18 that was decisive for Pike “just seems like an arbitrary number.”
Crowson represented Pike during a stage of her post-conviction case about 16 years earlier and said he visited her “dozens of times” on death row, last speaking with her in 2009. He described Pike at the time as “very superficially charming” and said the person he knew bore little resemblance to the teenager whose crime sent her to death row. “I never saw the Christa that committed those crimes that put her in prison,” Crowson said. “That person exists, obviously.”
The core of the post-conviction appeal, Crowson said, was ineffective assistance of counsel. His team argued that Pike’s original attorneys failed to adequately present evidence of her mental illness, brain damage, and history of severe childhood abuse during the sentencing phase. Pike was ultimately diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders. Despite the evidence, Crowson said, “there was a lot that was left out” at the time of her conviction, though he added: “Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. There are a lot of people who feel very strongly, and her crime was grisly and horrifying.”
In an earlier petition for clemency, Pike wrote: “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.”
The fallout from the botched execution widened on Saturday when Lee announced that Strada would resign later this month. Lee ordered an independent review and halted executions in Tennessee for the remainder of the year.
Strada’s resignation was a predictable consequence of a botched execution now under national scrutiny, Crowson said. “Whenever you have a disaster like this, there’s going to be some fallout,” he said. According to death penalty lawyers, Pike’s was at least the fifth execution Strada had botched since 2022, in Tennessee and in Arizona, where he previously worked.
What happens next depends on whether Pike ultimately survives the botched execution and, if she does, the extent of any lasting injuries. Crowson said he expects intense pressure on Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment if she recovers. If she suffered serious neurological damage, Crowson said, questions about her competency would become central to any attempt by Tennessee to execute her again.
Crowson said he hopes Pike’s case results in the government taking a closer look at the death penalty as a functional legal punishment. He said there is a clear pattern between people sentenced to death and their history of trauma and mental illness not being accounted for during trial and sentencing. “I think we as a nation have a strange relationship with mental illness,” Crowson said. “It’s just so often discounted and mocked. It’s unfortunate.”