Prison chief in Christa Pike case oversaw five ‘botched’ executions, lawyers say
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Frank Strada in Nashville, Tennessee, on 13 August. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP View image in fullscreen Frank Strada in Nashville, Tennessee, on 13 August. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP Tennessee Prison chief in Christa Pike case oversaw five ‘botched’ executions, lawyers say Frank Strada facing mounting questions after Pike survives injection with lethal drugs in Tennessee
Prefer the Guardian on Google 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 .
View image in fullscreen The state prison in Florence, Arizona. Photograph: AP The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization that studies capital punishment, classified all three Arizona executions as “botched”, based on researchers’ analysis. “Botched” is not a legal term, but the group says executions can be botched when there is a breakdown in protocol or unexpected problems or delays that cause needless suffering.
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.
Despite reports of three botched Arizona executions, Lee appointed Strada to head Tennessee’s prisons in early 2023. That appointment came while Tennessee was grappling with its own scandals around lethal injections, with a 2022 state-commissioned independent report finding that Tennessee had failed to follow protocol in several executions, not properly tested drugs and had a “tunnel-vision, result-oriented” approach to executions.
Death row attorneys have argued that Strada has failed to address the problems raised in that report.
Under Strada, Tennessee removed a key training requirement for people involved in lethal injections, according to Kit Thomas, a death row attorney. Before Strada joined, execution team members were directed to practice catheterization with saline, records show. But training guidelines put in place under Strada eliminated that requirement, saying: “No IV is inserted into the person playing the role of the inmate.”
“He reduced the training requirements and we’ve seen disastrous results,” said Thomas. “He oversaw executions in Arizona which involved prolonged, torturous attempts to establish IV lines, and he brought a similar practice here.”
View image in fullscreen The execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, on 13 October 1999.…
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