Tennessee prison chief quits after Christa Pike survives two lethal injections

Tennessee's prison commissioner, Frank Strada, resigned on Saturday, three days after the state failed twice to kill Christa Pike by lethal injection. Governor Bill Lee said Strada will leave later this month. The remaining execution on the state's calendar this year has been paused.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in about 200 years. The execution was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Wednesday. By evening she had survived two attempts to inject a lethal dose of pentobarbital and was taken to hospital.

The day did not follow the written timetable. Media witnesses and Pike's lawyers described an hour of attempts to place catheters, against a protocol that sets the IV process at about 10 minutes. Attorney Randy Spivey said he counted at least seven needles in her left arm alone, and that one appeared bent when it was pulled out. Pike's legal team had warned at a hearing last month that she had small veins and a blood disorder, and that vein access was likely to fail.

A stay from a lower court held the execution for part of the afternoon. Just after 5:45 p.m. the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay and the process resumed. Pike was strapped to a gurney and taken to the chamber. After the injections she was still alive. Catherine Sweeney of WPLN, who has witnessed most of Tennessee's recent executions, said Pike was snoring loudly and that nothing about the sequence matched the earlier cases she had covered.

By Thursday Pike was in critical condition and receiving treatment her lawyers described as life-saving. Court filings cited by The New York Times said that as of Thursday evening she was unconscious, intubated and breathing through a ventilator, with injuries on both arms from the failed attempts. Spivey asked Lee to commute the sentence, arguing that she had already been put through a punishment beyond any previous American execution.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed the lethal injection protocol. Lee said on Thursday that, so far as he knew, the department had followed the protocol outlined and approved by the attorney general's office. The protocol does not say what staff should do if two attempts fail. That gap is now the centre of the review Lee ordered. He said a third party would determine what occurred. Two days after defending the protocol, he announced Strada's resignation.

Strada maintained, in a statement released through the governor's office, that the agency had carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol. His departure follows Tennessee's second failed lethal injection this year and bipartisan calls for him to go. It is also the second pause on executions in the state in five years. An earlier moratorium followed problems with the previous drug sequence and with how the department stored and tested its chemicals.

Pentobarbital is the single drug in the current Tennessee protocol. Pike's lawyers had argued that the supply available to the state was degraded and that no emergency medical care would be on hand if the execution went wrong. After Wednesday they said those warnings had been borne out: difficult veins, blown veins, and a prisoner left alive after two doses. The department has not published assay results for the batch used on Pike. Lee's review is the route through which those records, if they exist, would become public.

The legal position is unsettled. Pike is still under a death sentence. She is also a hospital patient who cannot currently be returned to the chamber. Her lawyers will use the arm injuries, the hour of needle attempts and the two failed doses in any new challenge. The state has not said whether it will seek a new date once the review ends, or whether the review will recommend changes to vein-access rules, drug testing, or the absence of a stop rule after a failed attempt.

For other states that use a single dose of pentobarbital, the Pike case is a record of what the Tennessee protocol does not cover. It assumes the IVs go in, the drug works, and the prisoner dies. On Wednesday none of those three steps held. Strada's resignation removes the official who ran the attempt. It does not answer whether the next commissioner inherits the same protocol or a rewritten one.