Death Penalty News

Dr. Mark Fowler assisted in the failed execution of a Tennessee prisoner. Physicians are meant to heal patients—why is he working in the death chamber? Mark Fowler, a physician with 25 years’ experience, stepped beneath the bright lights and approached the middle-aged man lying on a gurney. Around him, people in medical gowns prepared needles and sterile tubing. It had all the appearances of a hospital setting. Fowler had been called in to help establish an IV line through which the 57-year-old man, Tony Carruthers, would be injected with pharmaceutical drugs. The team had struggled to find a vein, so Fowler was summoned to set a central line—an intravenous catheter inserted into the major vein below the collarbone.

Tennessee’s execution protocol is medically unethical and should be revamped before further executions occur, nearly 40 health care professionals said in a letter to Gov. Bill Lee. Like the coalition of faith leaders who asked for a moratorium on executions earlier this month, the physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals who signed the July 28 letter said they were motivated to speak up after the gruesome and botched execution of Tony Carruthers in May. Carruthers spent 90 minutes bleeding and writhing in agony as an attending physician made repeated unsuccessful attempts to insert an IV into the inmate’s chest after being unable to find useable veins in the arms, legs, and feet. Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve after the ordeal.

A formal complaint has been filed with the Tennessee Department of Health regarding the conduct of a physician involved in the failed execution of death row inmate Tony Carruthers on May 21, 2026. The complaint, submitted by Carruthers’ sister, Tonya Hervey on July 15, alleges that Dr. Mark Walton Fowler engaged in unethical medical practices during the aborted procedure. The state’s attempt to execute Carruthers was halted after execution team members spent over an hour unsuccessfully attempting to establish a backup intravenous (IV) line. While a primary line was established, the team’s failure to secure the secondary access required by state protocol led Governor Bill Lee to grant a one-year reprieve.

The protocol that took effect in 2025 sheds new light on Tony Carruthers’ botched execution, when Dr. Mark Fowler spent nearly an hour trying, and failing, to place a secondary IV line Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol adopted a year and a half ago appears to include reduced training in IV placement. That’s the part of the process prison staff failed to complete last month before aborting the execution of Tony Carruthers. Filings from ongoing litigation over the protocol show concerns about the executioners’ training and qualifications aren’t new. 

February 21, 2006, a California court’s deci­sion effec­tive­ly halt­ed the planned exe­cu­tion of Michael Angelo Morales, mark­ing the start of California’s 20-year mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tion sched­ul­ing and throw­ing into the spot­light the ten­sion between physi­cian par­tic­i­pa­tion in exe­cu­tions and their pledge to show ​“ the utmost respect for life .” " The events sur­round­ing Morales’s impend­ing fate brought to the sur­face the long-run­ning schism between law and med­i­cine, rais­ing the ques­tion of whether any ben­e­fi­cial con­nec­tion between the pro­fes­sions ever exist­ed in the exe­cu­tion con­text. History shows it sel­dom did. Decades of botched exe­cu­tions prove it. " — Professor Deborah Denno, The Lethal Injection Quandary: How Medicine Has Dismantled the Death Penalty

Physicians should never have a role in making a prisoner more fit to be killed On August 5, 2025, the state of Tennessee executed prisoner Byron Black by intravenous injection of a large dose of pentobarbital. Witnesses to his execution reported that he was visibly in distress or discomfort. Before he died, he reportedly said, "I can't do this," and that it was hurting "so bad."  We cannot know specifically what he felt.

Dr. Joseph Antognini travels across the nation, being paid over $500 an hour by government officials who rely on him to vouch for their execution protocols. This [article] is part of “ Operating Capital ,” an ongoing Lens discussion about Louisiana’s resumption of executions. Earlier this month, Dr. Joseph Antognini, a California-based retired anesthesiologist, walked into the execution chamber at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He tried on the air-tight mask that prison staff plan to use to execute Death Row prisoner Jessie Hoffman , using nitrogen hypoxia, a method that Louisiana executioners have never before used.

Eight times, a medical team in an Idaho prison tried to establish an intravenous line to deliver a lethal injection to condemned inmate Thomas Creech. But their attempts failed, giving Creech an unsettling reprieve. The incident last week raised sharp questions, such as: Who serves on the medical team used for executions by the Idaho Department of Correction?

Since its advent more than 40 years ago, lethal injection has become by far the most common method of enacting capital punishment in the United States, accounting for the vast majority of executions since the penalty was reinstated in 1976. The US government and 27 states reserve the death penalty for those deemed the worst of the worst. Convicted of particularly heinous crimes, inmates are typically put to death after their appeals run out, often a yearslong process that regularly reaches the US Supreme Court – which has found lethal injection constitutional and not a violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

A May 20, 2023 editorial in a leading medical academic journal concludes that physician participation in executions “goes against the ethical foundation of the physician’s role” and argues that doctors and medical associations should oppose capital punishment.  The editorial in The Lancet describes how many physicians currently participate in executions: Doctors “clinically assess mental competence for execution; physically examine and monitor vital signs before, during, and after execution; and certify death. In extreme cases, physicians take the role of executioner and are implicated in illegal organ procurement from executed prisoners.” 

After 37 years of silence, a South Carolina prison doctor who was In the execution chamber when eight prisoners it was his duty to treat were put to death has for the first time publicly discussed his conflicting roles. In an interview with Chiara Eisner of the Columbia newspaper, The State, shortly after South Carolina Department of Corrections announced plans to carry out executions by firing squad, Dr. Green Neal stepped forward to share his experiences. “Death is death, no matter whether it’s by disease, by homicide, whether it’s state sanctioned or murder,” Neal said. “But it’s just, here I am, I’m supposed to be saving people, not killing people.” The article, published May 4, 2022 in South Carolina’s second-largest newspaper, highlights Neal’s experiences as a prison medical director charged with both being doctor to the people on the state’s death row as well as being in their execution chambers and signing their death certificates. A doctor who participates in executions viola...

Oklahoma is paying $15,000 per execution, plus $1,000 for each day of training, to an unnamed doctor to participate in the process of putting state prisoners to death. Under the agreement, the doctor stood to receive an estimated $130,000 over the course of the 19-week-period between October 28, 2021 and March 10, 2022 in which the state had scheduled the executions of seven prisoners. The payments were disclosed by Oklahoma prison officials during federal court hearings in January 2022 on motions by Donald Grant and Gilbert Postelle to stay their executions. Grant was executed January 27, 2022 and Postelle’s execution is set for February 17, 2022. According to The Oklahoman , which first reported the payments, Oklahoma Corrections Department operations chief Justin Farris recruited the doctor in 2021. Farris testified that the doctor participates in verifying that executioners are using the correct three drugs authorized in the state’s lethal-injection protocol, placing the intravenou...

If the state of Florida is unable to execute prisoners without shrouding the process in secrecy, it’s another reason that capital punishment should be ended entirely.  State prison officials are asking the Legislature to make confidential any records that “could reasonably lead to the identification of any person or entity participating in an execution,” the Tampa Bay Times-Miami Herald Tallahassee Bureau recently reported.  The legislation is aimed at hiding the supply chain behind the mix of drugs used in lethal injections, according to the report. Death penalty opponents would then be prevented from pressuring drug makers into blacklisting the state from buying their products. Secrecy is nothing new for the state of Florida when it comes to capital punishment. State officials have long shielded the death penalty from scrutiny. During my first four years as a reporter for The Sun, I witnessed and wrote about seven executions at Florida State Prison near Starke. The barbarity...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Two physicians enlisted to oversee what would be Nevada’s first execution since 2006 don’t ever want to be identified publicly, state officials told a federal judge on Wednesday. Prison officials want to use a never-before-tried combination of three or four drugs to execute Zane Michael Floyd by lethal injection, including the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl and the anesthetic ketamine. The 46-year-old Floyd, who was was convicted in 2000 of killing four people and wounding a fifth in a 1999 shotgun attack at a Las Vegas grocery store, does not want to die and has several cases that could delay or stop his execution pending in court. His attorneys have asked U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware II to require the state to provide information about the professional qualifications of any doctors, emergency medical technicians and intravenous injection administrators involved in the execution. Randall Gilmer, chief deputy Nevada state attorney general, said Wednesday he...

Imagine it’s your job to kill people. Now imagine that you love that job so much that you will go out of your way, in every respect, to be able to do it. Imagine further that this is a sweet government gig, with all the perks and bennies that some people only dream about. What would you call that person, that job? There’s “executioner,” of course, which conjures up terrifying images of hooded, axe-wielding strongmen, and typically refers to the person whose job it is to carry out a death sentence. But that only speaks to the end of a years and years-long process to get the condemned on that electric chair or, in the case of Nevada, strapped onto a gurney to be lethally injected with whatever poison has been deemed not cruel and unusual. You know, just murderous. Before we get there, though, it truly takes a village—of people so invested in the power (or the power trip) of taking someone’s life that they will block any efforts to stop them from doing so, but also of people along the cha...

The Trump administration’s latest move to revive the death penalty for federal capital punishment cases is indefensible, and not just because it is doubling down on a practice abandoned by the rest of the developed world. To carry out the sentences, the administration will need to recruit private companies that will profit off these killings — and the public will likely have no way of knowing who these new hooded executioners will be. Attorney General William P. Barr has already picked out the five prisoners on death row to be scheduled for lethal injection, ending the federal government’s 16-year moratorium on the death penalty. He also announced that to do so, the government will use a lethal injection drug known as pentobarbital. This is significant because there is only one manufacturer approved by the Food and Drug Administration to sell the chemical, which is most typically used to euthanize animals: Akorn Pharmaceuticals . Akorn, like most drug manufacturers, is stau...

Anesthesiologist Joel Zivot, MD, says he won't give Missouri officials an opinion on which execution method might result in the lowest risk of severe pain for a prisoner on death row because he feels ethically unable to compare the consequences of alternative forms of execution allowed under state law. Missouri officials say that because prisoner Russell Bucklew didn't offer testimony to directly compare each method of execution and show that one "significantly reduces the risk of severe pain," the man hasn't met his burden to be put to death by something other than the state's standard lethal injection protocol. Bucklew says he will suffer unnecessarily if he is put to death by the standard lethal-injection protocol. Instead, Bucklew is asking he be put to death by lethal gas because he believes it will cause him less suffering due to his rare medical condition, cavernous hemangioma. The condition causes blood-filled tumors to grow on his body. He ...

"I believe that there is nothing humane about killing a human being. We speak of humane modes of execution only for animals to put them out of their suffering." Attorney General Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh recently announced that Oklahoma would no longer attempt to execute prisoners by lethal injection and would begin drafting a protocol for a new mode of execution, inert gas inhalation or nitrogen hypoxia. They admitted that lethal injection is unworkable in Oklahoma. Allbaugh said he has been engaged in a search for drugs for 2 years that has taken him "to the backstreets of the Indian subcontinent" and has been unable to purchase them. Hunter blamed the inability to purchase drugs on "a guerrilla war waged against the death penalty by its opponents," seeking to intimidate and boycott drug suppliers. I suggest that the primary reason that lethal injection has become unworkable is that doctors and pharmacists have refuse...