Well, bless their hearts. Tennessee spent thirty years getting ready to execute Christa Pike, a woman sentenced to death back in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, and when the moment finally came Wednesday, the state couldn’t even get that right. Two doses of pentobarbital, folks. Two. And she’s still with us, unconscious on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital while doctors try to scrub the poison back out of her body.
I have questions for the manager. Several of them.
How does a government with a budget bigger than most countries’ fail at the one job it’s had three decades to prepare for? This isn’t rocket surgery. It’s not splitting the atom. It is a single, scheduled, fully staffed procedure in a special room built for exactly this purpose. And it’s the second time since May that Tennessee has stood a prisoner at death’s door and then… nothing. At some point “whoops” stops being an answer.
Saturday, Governor Bill Lee finally did what everybody from his own party on down had been hollering for: he announced that Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada is stepping down this month. Strada says leaving is in the “best interests” of the state, which is bureaucrat for “the bus is leaving and I’m under it.” The governor praised his “integrity,” and maybe he has some, but I’d note that a man of integrity usually notices the death chamber is broken before the second botched execution in five months.
To his credit, Lee didn’t stop at one resignation. He’s halted every execution in Tennessee for the rest of the year and put former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton in charge of an independent review. This is the same Ed Stanton Lee hired in 2022 after calling off a different execution, so at least the governor knows who to call when the wheels come off. Whether anything gets fixed this time is another question entirely. Stanton wrote a report last time. Here we are anyway.
Now Pike’s lawyers are calling the resignation “justified” but say it “does nothing to help Christa now,” and they want her sentence commuted. Well, of course they do. That’s what lawyers are for. But let’s keep our eyes on what we can see with our own two eyes: a woman convicted of a monstrous murder is now lying in an intensive care unit, on the taxpayer’s dime, because the state that was supposed to deliver justice delivered a catastrophe instead. Her defense team calls it “a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person,” and for once I agree with the lawyers. Though I’d wager we disagree mightily about what ought to happen next.
Here’s the part that sticks in my craw. The same folks who run this death chamber want you to believe they’re competent to run everything else, your schools, your health care, your whole life top to bottom. They can’t run a room with one chair and one syringe. Every small-government bone in my body is doing a slow nod right now.
Colleen Slemmer’s family has waited since 1996 for justice. Instead they got a ventilator, a resignation letter, and another blue-ribbon review. That’s not justice. That’s not even a good apology. That’s government work, hon.