Lethal Injection Costs Strada His Job
Tennessee prison chief Frank Strada resigned after Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital.
The argument
Fix the protocol or end the method?
Tennessee prison chief Frank Strada resigned after Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital.
Fix the protocol or end the method?
Pike's lawyers say she is unconscious on a ventilator at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, both arms swollen, burned and blistered from pentobarbital that seeped from misplaced IV lines no one on the execution team noticed.
Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada offered his resignation, effective this month, and Gov. Bill Lee accepted it on Saturday. Lee said Strada served with integrity; an interim commissioner is to be named later.
A death warrant is the paperwork that expired at midnight while the state was still trying to make it come true.
A firing squad is what Pike's lawyers asked for, what Tennessee law forbade, and what the needle then made look merciful.
An independent review is Tennessee's answer to a botched execution, in 2022 and again in 2026: the ritual between the ones it botches.
A resignation, in Nashville this week, is the one procedure the Department of Correction completed on the first attempt.
The Tennessee Department of Correction is an agency whose name now reads as an instruction.
A botched execution, in Tennessee, is a protocol followed exactly, twice in five months.