Tennessee’s prison chief is under fire over the botched execution of Christa Pike, which lawyers say was the fifth “botched” execution under his leadership in two states since 2022. Frank Strada, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Corrections, has faced growing questions about the state’s top-secret death penalty protocols since Wednesday night, when Pike became the first death row inmate in the United States to be injected with lethal drugs and survive. Witnesses said Pike, 50, was heard choking. and struggling an hour after receiving the first injection of pentobarbital, a sedative, and after a second dose failed to kill her, she was hospitalized in critical condition. Strada’s scrutiny comes as Pike’s botched execution has sparked international outrage, with lawyers and advocates calling for a national halt to executions in the United States. Pike’s lawyers have called the process “cruel and torturous,” and one death penalty expert said it was the worst botched execution in modern history. Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee, suspended executions in the state until the end of the year and ordered an independent investigation. He called the case “deeply disturbing,” but when asked by a reporter about Strada’s leadership, Lee responded, “As far as we know, the department of correction followed exactly the protocol that was outlined.” The journalist was pressing the governor about Strada’s history, which includes another botched execution in May of this year, when Tennessee officials struggled for more than an hour to locate Tony Carruthers’ vein, causing the procedure to be canceled. And when Strada was deputy prison warden in Arizona in 2022, the state carried out three executions that experts and lawyers say were protracted and “botched.” Death penalty lawyers said there were commonalities in the five problematic executions under Strada, including prolonged prisoner suffering and questionable injection procedures, and argued that Lee should never have appointed Strada given his record in Arizona. Spokespeople for the Tennessee Department of Corrections declined to answer questions about Strada’s background Friday, saying the commissioner was unavailable. for an interview. A spokesman for Lee did not respond to questions. ‘Bugled’ executions in Arizona After joining the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2020, Strada oversaw executions, which included training the teams that carried out the procedures, monitoring practices and obtaining drugs for lethal injection, he said in a statement. At the May 2022 execution of Clarence Dixon in Arizona, a media witness said the execution team had difficulty placing IVs to administer the lethal drugs, ultimately requiring them to make an incision in the groin to insert the IV. That process, according to his lawyers, took approximately 40 minutes. In June 2022, a witness said Frank Atwood, a death row prisoner, had to help executioners find a vein after officials repeatedly struggled to kill the 66-year-old man, who had a degenerative spinal condition. And in November 2022, Arizona officials struggled to find a vein in Murray Hooper, forcing them to insert a catheter into his groin. Florence State Prison, Arizona. Photo: APThe Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that studies capital punishment, classified all three executions in Arizona as “botched,” according to researchers’ analysis. “Failure” is not a legal term, but the group says executions can fail when there is a flaw in protocol or unexpected problems or delays that cause unnecessary suffering. Dale Baich, who represented death row prisoners in Arizona during Strada’s tenure, said the fact that execution officers had difficulty finding veins suggested they were unqualified: “If your job is to access veins, you should be able to do that…to me, it indicated that the department of corrections did not adequately vet those team members.” In a 2023 deposition in a court case, Arizona’s corrections director said his review of execution procedures identified “several critical issues,” including “inadequate knowledge and experience” of people involved in the executions, concerns about intravenous equipment procedures and concerns about the effectiveness of medications. lethal injections, and a 2022 state-commissioned independent report found that Tennessee had failed to follow protocol in several executions, had not adequately tested medications, and had a “tunnel-vision, results-oriented” approach to executions. Before Strada joined, members of the execution team were ordered to perform saline catheterization, records show. But training guidelines implemented under Strada eliminated that requirement, saying, “No intravenous line is inserted into the person performing the inmate role.” “It reduced training requirements and we’ve seen disastrous results,” Thomas said. “He oversaw executions in Arizona that involved prolonged and tortuous attempts to establish intravenous lines, and he brought a similar practice here.” The execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 13, 1999. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP After Strada left Arizona, prison officials made changes to the state’s lethal injection process, including increasing the number of people on the intravenous team responsible for the injections and requiring more rigorous training, records show. But Strada has not overseen similar changes in Tennessee, instead implementing a protocol that mirrored Arizona’s long-standing policy of requiring only two people on the intravenous team that gives the injections, Thomas said. Thomas also provided excerpts from a November 2025 deposition in which Strada was questioned by death row lawyers. When Strada was asked what he considered a successful execution, he responded: “The condemned is executed.” When a lawyer asked, “Anything else?” Strada replied, “No.” Thomas said Strada’s response suggested he had “no regard for the experience of the executed individual, other than that he ends up dead.” The response, he added, echoed the same “tunnel vision” approach to executions that investigators had denounced in the Tennessee-commissioned report in 2022. In the 2025 statement, Strada further acknowledged that he had not followed some of the 2022 report’s recommendations, including failing to hire a full-time employee or consultant with pharmaceutical expertise to provide guidance on the lethal injection process and failing to hire a full-time employee or consultant to help locate lethal weapons. injection sources. “What good is an independent investigation if those investigators provide recommendations that are ignored?” Questions about how the state acquires, maintains and administers lethal injection drugs are critical following the botched murder of Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 at age 20 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike’s attorneys said Friday that she remained unconscious and on a ventilator. Prison officials have not addressed questions of what may have gone wrong, but some outside experts have questioned whether the pentobarbital may have degraded or not properly entered his bloodstream and instead leaked into surrounding tissue. Christa Pike in court in Nashville on April 12, 2012. Photograph: Dipti Vaidya/Imagn Images/Reuters ConnectTennessee keeps secret the identities of people involved in executions and basic information about the drugs used in executions. Thomas pointed out a series of questions that Strada previously declined to answer, including whether he was using the same drug supplier he used in Arizona, whether the Tennessee supplier had complied with Food and Drug Administration rules and regulations, and whether it had any procedures or checklists to ensure lethal injection chemicals had not been adulterated. Stephen Ferrell, a federal defender and one of Pike’s attorneys, expressed skepticism about the governor’s call for another independent investigation, highlighting the state’s latest independent investigation into the death. “We are being kept in the dark,” he said at a news conference Thursday, noting that journalists who served as witnesses to Pike’s botched assassination also expressed concern about the secrecy surrounding the execution procedure: “Our predictions are downplayed, and yet they continue to come true. Tennessee should not torture its citizens in the name of justice.” elected in the November midterm elections. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Tennessee officials should answer questions about Strada’s involvement in multiple botched executions. He also expressed concern about the lack of transparency or accountability after Carruthers’ botched execution in May: “We saw no information as to why this had gone wrong and no explanation or corrective action to ensure it did not happen again.”
