The Execution That Failed Twice: Tennessee's Prison Chief Resigns After Christa Pike Survives Lethal Injection

Tennessee's prison chief has resigned after the state botched its second lethal injection this year. Frank Strada, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Correction, will step down this month, Governor Bill Lee announced on Saturday. The move comes days after Christa Pike survived two doses of the execution drug pentobarbital and was rushed to a hospital, where her lawyers say she remains intubated and on a ventilator.

Strada said his resignation was "in the best interest of Tennesseans" as an independent review proceeds. He reiterated his belief that the department had followed its lethal-injection protocol, but said he supported the investigation and would cooperate. Lee accepted the resignation and praised Strada's "willingness to put the interests of Tennesseans first during this difficult moment."

Pike's lawyers called the resignation "justified" but said it "does nothing to help Christa now." In a statement, they described what happened as "a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person" and expressed hope that the governor's review would "expose the profound problems within Tennessee's entire death penalty system."

Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the 1995 murder of her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead, the execution team spent an hour trying to establish IV lines. Pike's defense lawyer, Randy Spivey, counted at least seven needles in her left arm, one of them bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.

According to court filings by Pike's attorneys, problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream. "Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms. Pike's body," they wrote. Instead of remedying the failure, the team prepared and administered a second dose.

Pike remained conscious and audible throughout. Media witnesses reported hearing her snoring and breathing loudly long after the curtains were closed. When the microphone in the execution chamber was cut off more than an hour into the attempt, she was still making sounds. An ambulance transported her to a hospital, where hospital staff were working to save her life and clear the drug from her system.

This was not the first time Tennessee's execution system has failed. In 2022, Governor Lee paused all executions after discovering that the state had failed to properly test its lethal injection drugs. An independent review led by former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton found that the state hadn't complied with its own lethal injection process since 2018 and that the unidentified executioner had no formal healthcare training. After the report, the state switched to a single-drug protocol using pentobarbital.

Earlier this year, in May, Tennessee botched the execution of Tony Carruthers when officials could not establish an IV line. Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve but declined to change the protocol. Now Lee has halted all remaining executions for 2026 and ordered a third-party review—again led by Ed Stanton. The review will examine whether the department followed its execution procedures and whether changes are necessary. But the governor has defended the department's actions, saying that "so far as we know, the Department of Correction followed the protocol as outlined and vetted and approved by the Attorney General's Office."

Strada was appointed in January 2023 to restore integrity to a system in crisis. But court filings and sworn depositions from a November 2025 deposition reveal that he treated key safeguards as optional. When asked under oath whether the department had hired a full-time pharmaceutical expert as recommended by the 2022 Stanton Report, Strada admitted it had not. "It was only a recommendation," he said. "It wasn't a requirement."

He also acknowledged that an annual audit of the execution protocol, explicitly required by state policy, was never completed. When asked how he would judge whether the protocol actually works, Strada offered a stark definition of success: "The condemned is put to death." Before coming to Tennessee, Strada served as a deputy director in Arizona's Department of Corrections. During his tenure there, all three executions carried out in 2022 encountered difficulties establishing IV lines.

Colleen Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, traveled from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution. After it failed, she said simply: "I didn't get justice for my daughter."

For now, Christa Pike remains alive in a hospital bed. The man responsible for Tennessee's execution system has resigned. The governor has halted further killings. And a state that has botched two executions in a single year is facing the same question it has faced before: how many times can a system fail before it is forced to change?

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com