State ordered to state whether it will use doctor involved in failed execution

A Davidson County judge is requiring the state to reveal whether it plans to use the same doctor involved in a botched May execution in the Aug. 13 lethal injection scheduled for death row inmate Darrell Hines.

Chancellor Russell Perkins granted the request of Hines’ attorneys, compelling the Department of Correction to state whether Dr. Mark Fowler will oversee Hines’ execution after they argued that his lack of medical skills contributed to the failed execution of inmate Tony Carruthers and could cause Hines to suffer through a similar botched procedure, according to a release from Hines’ legal team. Carruthers is on death row for a triple murder.

Perkins ruled that Hines’ attorneys showed the state is likely to use Fowler and that it waived the protection of his identity. The chancellor postponed the state’s obligation to respond until a higher court reviews the decision.

“It’s unconscionable that TDOC continues to withhold this information,” said Hines’ attorney, Kit Thomas. 

The state has claimed a secrecy law enables it to conceal the physician’s identity and whether it plans to use Fowler, even though it has publicly disclosed his name, according to the release. 

The physician tried for more than an hour to insert backup and central intravenous lines on Carruthers, as required by protocol, before Gov. Bill Lee called off the execution and postponed it for a year. Witnesses called it a bloody “torture.”

Attorneys for Hines, who is convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of motel maid Catherine Jenkins in Kingston Springs, point out that Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol requires the execution physician to be able to insert a central line but that Fowler acknowledged in a court document he had performed the procedure about 12 times in an emergency room but not since 2013 and doesn’t have privileges to conduct one at any hospital.

Lee declined to postpone the Hines execution and two others set for this year even though a group of Republican senators urged him to commission an independent review of the botched execution and correct any problems before the state attempts another one.