The head of Tennessee's prison system is resigning, Gov. Bill Lee announced Saturday, the first major staff shake-up since Christa Pike's stunning failed execution left her unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital.
Frank Strada, commissioner of the Department of Correction, will step down this month, Lee said. Some of the governor's fellow Republicans and other elected officials had been urging a change in leadership.
It was the second time since May that Tennessee has not been able to execute a prisoner who was seemingly moments away from death.
Strada said in a statement that resigning was “in the best interest of Tennesseans” while an independent review determines what happened Wednesday when the state failed to execute Pike despite administering two doses of a lethal drug.
“I believe this review is entirely appropriate and necessary, and I look forward to doing everything I can to help determine exactly what occurred,” Strada said.
Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in 1995. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.
Pike was taken to a hospital from prison Wednesday night, where she was on a ventilator and unconscious in the hours following the execution attempt, her attorneys said in a court filing Friday.
Hospital staff were working to save Pike’s life and, as of late Thursday, were trying to clear the two doses of pentobarbital, which the state uses to execute prisoners, lawyers said.
The shocking failure has left both sides of the death penalty debate demanding answers. Lee has ordered an independent review and halted any new executions. Strada said he believes the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”
Pike's legal team welcomed Strada's departure but said “it does nothing to help Christa now.”
“What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person,” the four-lawyer team said. “We hope the governor’s call for a full, independent review will expose the profound problems within Tennessee’s entire death penalty system.”
Pike’s attorneys said they believed problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
In May, Tennessee stopped the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff placed an IV into his right arm but couldn’t get a secondary IV line. The governor ordered officials to wait at least a year before trying to execute him again.
Strada took over the Correction Department in January 2023 after serving as deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections. In late 2024, he announced that Tennessee was changing its lethal injection protocol and would use only pentobarbital.
Four people have been executed in Tennessee since 2025, according to the Correction Department.
When Strada was in Arizona, that state in 2022 resumed executions after a nearly eight-year break, following criticism about a 2014 execution that took about two hours as well as difficulties obtaining certain drugs.
