Frank Strada, head of Tennessee’s prisons, is resigning after the state failed to carry out the execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, Governor Bill Lee said on Saturday. Strada will step down this month.
Strada confirmed his resignation, saying Pike had survived despite being given two doses of the lethal injection, that the matter was under investigation and that he was resigning in the interest of Tennesseans.
Pike, convicted of murder, was due to be executed at 10am on Wednesday. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, but she survived two injections. Her lawyers have since sought to have her sentence commuted. She remains in critical condition in a hospital in Nashville, where she was taken by ambulance after the injections; her lawyers say she was heard crying and breathing heavily throughout, and she was unconscious and on a ventilator until Thursday night.
Her lawyers called the resignation justified but said it would not help Pike. “What happened to Christa on Wednesday points to a systemic failure. We hope a full and independent investigation will expose the deep problems in Tennessee’s execution system,” they said in a statement.
The state’s corrections department has defended the procedure, saying the protocol did not allow any steps beyond those followed. It has not said whether it will try again to execute Pike or explained whether anything went wrong. Her lawyers filed an emergency motion on Friday to preserve evidence from the execution.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report