Tennessee Prison Chief Was Hired Despite a Trail of Troubled Executions

The head of the agency that botched the execution of Christa Pike was brought to Tennessee three years ago to save the state's death penalty.

But the official, Frank Strada, had overseen three problem-plagued executions when he was a top prison official in Arizona, and his troubled record has become a focus of inquiries into how Ms. Pike ended up still alive after what should have been a lethal injection this week.

The questions swirling around Ms. Pike's failed execution echo some of the questions that arose in 2022 after a string of mishaps in executions in Arizona, where Mr. Strada was in charge of the teams that carried out death sentences. In each instance, according to lawyers and court records, the teams struggled to insert IVs into the condemned prisoners' arms. In one of the cases, the man being executed asked, "Can you believe it?" as the team resorted to inserting a line into his femoral vein. In another, a prisoner, already strapped to the gurney, urged the team to try a vein near his hand.

But in 2023, Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee recruited Mr. Strada to lead the state's Department of Correction and help restart executions, which had been put on hold in 2022. An independent review, conducted after the abrupt cancellation of a 2022 execution, had found that the state had for years failed to follow its lethal injection rules.

Since Mr. Strada arrived, the Correction Department not only has mishandled Ms. Pike's execution, but it also failed to execute another convicted murderer, Tony Carruthers, who killed three people and was supposed to be put to death in May.

Fed up, a number of Republican leaders are calling for Mr. Strada to be ousted and saying his tenure has been marred by mismanagement and secrecy.

"If I rated commissioners from one to 10, he would be a one," said State Senator Tom Hatcher, a Republican and former chairman of the oversight committee for the Department of Correction. "He does not want any kind of oversight."

State Representative Jody Barrett called it "a travesty and dereliction of duty" for Governor Lee, a Republican, to keep Mr. Strada in office, given that two of the last three executions this year have been botched.

"I don't know any professional career or position that would allow somebody to completely fail at their job two out of three times and continue to remain in that position," said Mr. Barrett, a Republican. "This is one of the most serious, if not the most serious, thing that a government does."

Mr. Strada could not be reached for an interview, and his office declined to comment. Mr. Strada said in 2024 that he had worked with the state attorney general's office to revise the lethal injection process and that he was confident that it would be effective.

After the failed execution, which has left Ms. Pike, 50, in critical condition and on a ventilator, Governor Lee suspended all pending executions and ordered an investigation. Ms. Pike was convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995 and had been on death row, largely in physical isolation, for about three decades before her scheduled execution Wednesday.

Asked on Thursday about the hiring of Mr. Strada, the governor said that "so far as we know, the Department of Correction followed exactly the protocol that was outlined and vetted and approved by the attorney general's office."

But U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican and the front-runner to succeed Mr. Lee as governor, signaled in a statement to The New York Times that Mr. Strada's days in office may be numbered.

"We are going to make changes in people and processes at the Department of Corrections, and we will start the changes at the top with new leadership in order to ensure the department fulfills its mission and responsibility to Tennesseans," Ms. Blackburn said.

Mr. Hatcher said he and his Republican colleagues have been in touch with Ms. Blackburn's team about the importance of moving swiftly to replace Mr. Strada, if Ms. Blackburn wins the governor's race in the heavily conservative state.

"Send him back to Arizona," Mr. Hatcher said.

The state legislators also noted that they were considering legislation that could preclude lethal injection while keeping electrocution legal and possibly adding firing squads as methods of execution.

When Mr. Strada, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was hired in Tennessee, many anti-death penalty lawyers were shocked, given his team's history in Arizona.

After Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, was elected governor of Arizona in 2022, her administration raised serious concerns about how the Department of Corrections and its execution program had been run under Mr. Strada, the deputy director, and his boss, David Shinn.

Ryan Thornell, who took over the agency under Governor Hobbs, said in a March 2023 legal declaration that he discovered a host of problems in the execution practices under the agency's previous deputy director. Without referring to Mr. Strada by name, Mr. Thornell said the deputy director had been the main point of contact with a pharmacist who compounded the drugs used in executions. However, Mr. Thornell said that the deputy director "didn't record anything" -- part of what Mr. Thornell called an "alarming lack of documentation and record keeping."

In his declaration, Mr. Thornell also raised concerns about the team that inserted IV lines into condemned prisoners, saying that under Mr. Strada and the prior administration, they had been directed to only use the prisoner's femoral vein, which went against the Corrections Department's policy.

In a 2025 court deposition of Mr. Strada obtained by The Times, he said that he brought his playbook from Arizona into his new role in Tennessee, where he also "started formulating a new set of protocols."

Under a 2018 protocol, the execution team in Tennessee would conduct trainings and dry runs of the entire execution process, during which the team would practice setting an IV into a volunteer's arm, using saline instead of lethal drugs.

That practice appeared to change under Mr. Strada. Tennessee's 2025 execution protocols contained an added provision that said, "No IV is inserted into the person playing the role of the inmate" during practice sessions.

Asked during the deposition if his execution team had "other training from an individual with a health care background," Mr. Strada replied, "Not to my knowledge."

After Mr. Strada arrived in Nashville, Republican lawmakers were initially eager to work with him.

But tensions quickly surfaced.

State Senator Richard Briggs -- the Republican chairman of a committee that oversees the Tennessee Department of Correction -- said in an interview that when he asked Mr. Strada about various issues, the commissioner was evasive or defensive.

"We would say, 'We're concerned about the number of deaths and beatings in a prison,'" Mr. Briggs said, "and he would say, 'Well, that used to be a problem under the old commissioner. It's not a problem now.'"

What lawmakers would claim was a "riot" in a prison, Mr. Strada would describe as "a minor disturbance," Mr. Briggs said.

When Mr. Briggs tried to convey frustrations to the governor's office, he said, he was told that Mr. Strada was here to fix the death penalty and that lawmakers needed to stay in their lane.

The senators did not.

After the previous failed execution earlier this year, a group of Republican lawmakers sent Mr. Lee a letter urging him to pause executions and review the state's procedures.

In recent months, lawmakers said they rarely received responses to questions sent to the Correction Department.

On Monday, lawmakers had expected to be able to question Mr. Strada during a committee hearing focused on the fatal stabbing of a correctional officer. But Mr. Briggs said they were informed of two updates by the governor's office.

"First of all, the commissioner is not coming," Mr. Briggs recalled being told. "And second, don't ask about the death penalty."

Georgia Gee and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.