Tennessee's top prisons official is stepping down and the state has halted all executions after a botched lethal injection left death row inmate Christa Pike alive and audibly breathing more than 20 minutes after the drugs were administered.

Gov. Bill Lee announced Saturday that Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada will resign later this month, days after Pike, 50 — the only woman on Tennessee's death row — survived two doses of pentobarbital during her scheduled execution Wednesday. Witnesses, including her attorneys, said Pike remained alive and was snoring loudly before she was taken off the gurney and transported to a hospital. Both of her arms were reported "swollen, burned and blistered," which her lawyers say suggests the intravenous lines were placed incorrectly or a vein burst during the procedure.

Strada, who took over Tennessee's prison system three years ago, previously held a senior post in Arizona's corrections department, where multiple executions conducted on his watch also ran into complications. In his resignation statement, Strada said stepping down was "in the best interest of Tennesseans" while the independent review the governor ordered examines exactly what went wrong in the death chamber.

"IN THE BEST INTEREST OF TENNESSEANS"

A Rare Public Reckoning

Botched executions are not unheard of in the era of lethal injection, but a sitting corrections commissioner resigning over one is unusual. Lee's decision to pause every scheduled execution in the state — not just Pike's case — while the review plays out signals how seriously Nashville is treating the failure, according to reporting from the Washington Post. Pike was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a case that made her the only woman on the state's death row.

What's next: Lee's independent review has no set deadline, but no execution can proceed in Tennessee until it concludes. A successor to Strada has not yet been named.