Tennessee's Prison Chief Just Resigned After Christa Pike Survived Two Lethal Injections

Weeks before her scheduled execution, Christa Pike told the New York Times in a prison recording that a botched lethal injection was her worst nightmare.

“Tony Carruthers lived out my worst nightmare. Detail for detail. And I don’t want to go through that.”

Then it happened anyway.

On Sept 30, Tennessee tried to execute Pike, 50, for the 1995 torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. The IV lines were not placed right. Her veins blew, and the pentobarbital went into the tissue under her skin instead of her bloodstream. Her lawyers said witnesses could hear her crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure. Two rounds of the drug failed to kill her. Her arms were left swollen, burned and blistered from the caustic drug.

Forty minutes after the procedure ended, Pike was still breathing and responsive. She was rushed to a hospital and put on a ventilator, unconscious and in critical condition, with hospital staff working to clear the drug from her system. Her attorneys had warned the state beforehand that her small veins and a blood disorder called thrombocytosis would make IV access especially difficult.

Today the fallout reached the top. Gov. Bill Lee announced that Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is resigning, stepping down this month while an independent review tries to figure out what went wrong. Lee already halted every execution in the state for the rest of 2026. Strada was previously a top prisons official in Arizona during three lethal injection executions that drew serious criticism.

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This was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year. In May, the state called off another execution after medical staff could not tap a vein in the prisoner’s arm.

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Instead she is the first death row inmate in history to survive lethal injection, and now the state that tried to kill her is fighting to keep her alive.