The needle failed twice: Tennessee prison chief quits after botched execution of Christa Pike

NASHVILLE: The head of Tennessee's prison system has resigned after the state failed to execute a woman it had sentenced to die. Governor Bill Lee announced on Saturday that Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada had offered his resignation and will step down this month. The resignation follows the botched execution of Christa Pike on September 30. Pike, 50, was injected with two rounds of the lethal drug pentobarbital at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville and survived both. She was rushed to a hospital, where her attorneys said she lay unconscious and on a ventilator, in critical condition. What happened in the execution chamber, according to her lawyers' court filing, was a prolonged ordeal. The state's intravenous team appeared never to realise that Pike's IV lines had not been correctly placed, or that her veins had blown, so that the pentobarbital was entering her tissue instead of her bloodstream. She was reportedly jabbed with at least seven needles; one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was pulled from her body. At one point, the condemned woman herself tried to help the IV team find a suitable vein. She could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing heavily throughout, and asked: "My arm feels like it is about to burst open. Does this happen like that?" "The resignation of Commissioner Strada is justified, but it does nothing to help Christa now," Pike's attorneys said in a statement. "What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person." Strada, for his part, insisted the department had "carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol," while calling the independent review "entirely appropriate and necessary." Governor Lee has ordered that review and halted all remaining executions scheduled in Tennessee for the rest of the year. This was the second execution disaster at Riverbend this year. In May, the scheduled execution of Tony Carruthers was aborted after the execution team repeatedly failed to establish IV lines, jabbing him in various parts of his body. And Strada's record follows him: he came to Tennessee in January 2023 from Arizona's corrections department, where he had been a top official during three lethal-injection executions that were later criticised for serious problems. Pike was to become the first woman executed in Tennessee since the 1800s, after the US Supreme Court ruled that her execution could proceed. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a crime committed when both were teenagers at a Job Corps centre in Knoxville. Her lawyers have asked a court to order the department to preserve all evidence linked to the failed attempt. The needles are out of her arms now. The questions about what Tennessee's death penalty actually is remain stuck in.