10/04/2026
BREAKING🚨 Tennessee's prison chief RESIGNED after they say, “he botched an ex*****on so badly the woman survived and ended up unconscious on a ventilator.”
He admitted under oath the state never hired a pharmaceutical expert investigators told him to bring in.
On Wednesday, Tennessee failed to execute Christa Pike, 50, for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. She survived two rounds of lethal injection drugs and was rushed to a hospital.
Hospital staff are still trying to clear both doses of pentobarbital from her body.
The ex*****on team went through SEVEN NEEDLES trying to find a vein.
Pike's attorneys say the IV lines were placed wrong, so the drug went into her body instead of her bloodstream. They wrote in a court filing that apparently nobody on the ex*****on team noticed "that the veins had blown."
"Last night was not just inefficient, it was cruel and it was torturous," Randy Spivey of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender said the next day.
On Saturday, Gov. Bill Lee announced that Frank Strada, the corrections commissioner he picked in 2023, will “step down.”
Lee then said Strada "served with integrity" and that he would pray for God's blessings over him.
Strada has admitted NO wrong doing. He says the department followed "the established protocol."
That “protocol” has a horrifying history. In April 2022, Lee had to stop Oscar Smith's ex*****on at the last minute over an “oversight in the preparation for lethal injection.” Apparently the drugs had never been tested.
An investigation Lee ordered afterward called for a dedicated pharmaceutical expert, strict chemical testing and real medical oversight of ex*****on teams. Asked under oath whether he had hired that pharmaceutical expert, Strada admitted he hadn't, as WKRN first reported.
His answer: "It was only a recommendation. It wasn't a requirement."
In May, Strada also botched Tony Carruthers' ex*****on after trying for more than an HOUR and failing to get IV lines in. That makes Christa Pike his second ex*****on to go horribly wrong at Nashville's Riverbend Maximum Security Institution this year alone.
Before Tennessee, Strada was deputy director of Arizona's prison system. While he was there, three lethal injection ex*****ons were criticized for serious problems.
Gov. Lee has paused ex*****ons for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review.
He still has not called off Christa Pike’s ex*****on.
The state is now providing life-saving care to keep an unconscious woman alive on a ventilator—knowing that if she wakes from her drug induced coma, they plan to put her right back on the ex*****on table.
What’s y’all’s thoughts about this?
