Prison chief resigns after failed execution attempt in US

The prison commissioner in the southern US state of Tennessee has resigned over the failed execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike, Governor Bill Lee has said.

Mr Lee said in a statement that commissioner Frank Strada would leave his post this month.

Mr Lee said he thanked Mr Strada for "his willingness to put the interests of Tennesseans first during this difficult moment".

In the same statement, Mr Strada said, "I continue to believe the Department (of Correction) carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol".

Mr Strada added that stepping aside "is in the best interests" of the state as an independent review is carried out to determine why Pike's execution failed on Wednesday.

Pike, a convicted killer, was left gravely ill, unconscious and hospitalised on life support after Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her by lethal ⁠injection.

Hospital staff are working to save Pike's life and clear the drug, pentobarbital, from her system, her attorneys said in an emergency motion, which seeks a court order for Tennessee's Department of Correction to preserve evidence from the botched execution.

Pike remained in critical condition, her lawyers said, after two doses of pentobarbital were administered to her intravenously at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The court filing said the attempt to establish intravenous lines also left both her arms "swollen, burned and blistered", the apparent result of the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeping into the tissues under her skin.

The lawyers accused Correction Department officials of disregarding prior warnings from Pike's doctors that pre-existing medical conditions - small veins and a blood disorder called thrombocytosis - would ‌make placing IV lines especially difficult.

"At no point did any ⁠member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike's body," her lawyers said in a filing in the Chancery Court for Tennessee's 20th Judicial District.

It said witnesses to the execution attempt could hear Pike "crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the procedure".

The filing provided the fullest picture yet of the medical consequences of an attempted execution that Governor Lee said followed the state's established protocol.

It was the state's second botched ‌execution this year, prompting Mr Lee to halt any further attempts to carry out the death penalty for the rest of 2026.

He also ordered an independent review of what went wrong.

Rejected clemency petition

Pike, 50, was convicted three decades ago of first-degree murder for her role ⁠in the torture and killing of a 19-year-old vocational school classmate, Colleen Slemmer, at the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville in 1995.

Pike was 18 at the time.

She ‌had been scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries, and the only person ⁠in the modern era of ‌US capital punishment to be executed in that state for a crime committed by a teenager.

Pike's then-17-year-old boyfriend was tried as an adult and convicted of murder as well, but received a life sentence with eligibility for parole.

A third schoolmate who was 18 at the time and acted as a lookout for the two others ended up testifying for the prosecution and received probation.

Governor Lee earlier this week ⁠rejected a clemency petition seeking to commute Pike's death penalty to a life prison term without the possibility of parole.

The petition argued for leniency, in part, on the basis of ⁠her childhood history of severe neglect, sexual abuse that included two rapes, and untreated mental illness.

The clemency petition also cited evidence that Pike's mother drank heavily during pregnancy, contributing to faulty brain development that made it difficult for her to control her impulses.

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an eleventh-hour stay of execution, which was issued earlier in the day by a federal appeals court to give more time to weigh Pike's claim that her childhood trauma was not properly considered in her sentencing.

In their filing yesterday, Pike's lawyers urged the state Chancery Court to order preservation of evidence they said would show that state prison personnel violated her constitutional rights by subjecting ‌her to cruel and unusual punishment.

Mr Lee has halted further executions through the rest of the year while a review is conducted.