Tennessee’s top prison official is stepping down just days after the state’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike, a case that has triggered an independent investigation and renewed scrutiny of Tennessee’s lethal injection procedures.
Pike, 50, was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday, September 30, for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Instead, the execution ended with Pike being rushed to an outside medical facility after two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her.
She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Now, as questions continue to mount over what happened inside the execution chamber, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada is preparing to leave his position.