Tennessee’s prison chief is under fire for the failed execution of Christa Pike, which lawyers say was the fifth “botched” execution under his leadership across two states since 2022. Frank Strada, the commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction, has faced mounting questions about the state’s highly secretive death penalty protocols since Wednesday evening when Pike became the first death row prisoner in the US to 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.
The scrutiny on Strada comes as Pike’s failed execution has sparked international outrage, with lawyers and advocates calling for a national halt on executions in the US. 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, Tennessee’s Republican governor, has suspended executions in the state until the end of the year and ordered an independent inquiry.
He called the case “deeply disturbing”, but when a reporter asked him about Strada’s leadership, Lee responded: “So far as we know, the department of correction followed exactly the protocol that was outlined.” The journalist was pressing the governor on Strada’s history, which includes another failed execution in May of this year, when Tennessee officials struggled for more than an hour to locate Tony Carruthers’ vein, prompting the procedure to be called off. And when Strada was a deputy prison director in Arizona in 2022, the state carried out three executions that experts and attorneys said were prolonged and “botched”. Death penalty lawyers said there were common threads in the five problematic executions under Strada, including the prisoners’ protracted suffering and questionable injection procedures, and argued Lee should never have appointed Strada given his Arizona record.
Tennessee department of correction spokespeople declined to answer questions about Strada’s record on Friday and said the commissioner was unavailable for an interview. A spokesperson for Lee did not respond to inquiries. After joining Arizona’s corrections department in 2020, Strada oversaw executions, which included forming the teams that carried out the procedures, monitoring the practices and obtaining lethal injection drugs, he said in a deposition.
In the May 2022 execution of Clarence Dixon in Arizona, a media witness said the execution team struggled to place IVs to administer the lethal drugs, ultimately requiring them to make an incision by his groin to insert the IV. That process, according to his attorneys, took roughly 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, 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. The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization that studies capital punishment, classified all three Arizona executions as “botched”, based on researchers’ analysis. Dale Baich, who represented Arizona death row prisoners during Strada’s tenure, said the fact that execution officials’ struggled to find veins suggested they were not qualified: “If your job is to access veins, you should be able to do that ... to me, it indicated the department of corrections did not properly vet those team members.” In a 2023 declaration in a court case, Arizona’s corrections director said his review of execution procedures identified “several critical issues”, including “inadequate knowledge and expertise” of the people involved in executions, concerns about the IV team’s procedures, and concerns about the efficacy of the drugs.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
