Mark Fowler, according to a deposition, had not placed a central line in a patient for more than a decade when he attempted to put one in Carruthers Around 11 a.m. Thursday morning in the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, a medical doctor stepped in and attempted to place a central IV line in Tony Carruthers’ chest. By that point, the prison staff had spent some 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to insert a backup IV line that would allow them to proceed with the lethal injection. According to Carruthers’ attorney Maria DeLiberato, who was in the room, after asking a staff member to attempt inserting a line through Carruthers’ jugular vein, the doctor moved on to the central line, which is identified as the last resort in Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol .
Richard R. Ramirez, who was sentenced to death for the 1983 rape and murder of a 22-year-old bank teller in Garden Grove, died in prison at age 66 on Sunday, May 24, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said. He died at a medical facility, authorities said, with his cause of death to be determined by the San Joaquin County coroner’s office. He was not the Night Stalker, who shared the same first and last names and was convicted of 13 murders and 30 other crimes committed up and down the state in the mid-1980s. That Richard Ramirez, also condemned to death, died in 2013 of natural causes.