The legal team of a woman who survived two ‘lethal injections’ has issued a damning statement after the state’s Head of Prison’s stepped down after the botched execution
The botched lethal injection prisoner’s legal team have issued a brutal statement following the resignation of Tennessee’s Head of Prisons.
Christa Pike, 50, was injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday but remains alive after being rushed to hospital. The woman was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
Now her lawyers want her sentence commuted after the failed bid to end her life. Earlier Today, state governor Bill Lee announced Frank Strada, commissioner of the Department of Correction, will step down this month after Pike’s failed execution.
In a statement Strada said resigning was “in the best interest of Tennesseans.” Pike’s attorneys welcomed Strada’s departure, but said it “does nothing to help Christa now.”
Her four-lawyer team said in a statement: “What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person. 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 legal team believe the problem with the failed execution was caused by the IV lines which led the pentobarbital to flow around her body. And not directly into her blood stream.
Strada was placed at the helm of the Correction Department in January 2023. The prison boss previously served as deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections. Back in late 2024 he announced Tennessee was changing their lethal injection protocol and would now only use pentobarbital.
An independent review is currently underway to determine what happened after the state failed to execute the woman. Strada: “I believe this review is entirely appropriate and necessary, and I look forward to doing everything I can to help determine exactly what occurred.”
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has since halted all executions in the state and ordered an investigation into Pike’s unprecedented botched execution.
Pike is currently in hospital, unconscious and incubated on a ventilator as doctors work to save her life and clear the drug from her system completely. Court papers say that during the execution, prison officials used an IV line on Pike, trying to gain IV access via seven different needle points.
Pike had been on death row for the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer in January 1995.
Slemmer was killed at age 19, after being lured into an isolated area on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. Pike was convicted alongside her boyfriend in 1996, and the court heard that there was a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest and Pike kept a bit of her skull as a souvenir.