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.

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.

Louisiana has resumed executions using a novel nitrogen gas method — a legacy, in part, of problems getting the drugs used for lethal injections. But the injection method remains on the books in the Pelican State. As the death penalty continues to make headlines across the South, the Gulf States Newsroom's Kat Stromquist spoke to University of Richmond law professor Corinna Barrett Lain about her new book, "Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection." In the book, Lain explores how — and why — lethal injection came into use.

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.

On Thursday evening, the state of Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith by nitrogen gas . Now, there are dueling narratives about what happened. Alabama claims it went perfectly, proving that nitrogen is a humane, effective alternative to lethal injection (which it previously tried, unsuccessfully, to use on Smith). It says that based on this experience, other states should follow its example. But witness accounts suggest that Smith’s death was cruel and tortuous.

The state confirmed the medical professionals' positions in a court hearing ahead of Thursday's scheduled lethal injection of James Barber The details emerged during a Monday hearing at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of James Barber, who has already served for than two decades in prison for the 2001 murder of Dorothy “Dottie” Epps in Harvest, Alabama. His execution is currently set to proceed Thursday at 6 p.m. inside Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. During Monday’s hearing, a lawyer for the state, Rich Anderson, told a panel of judges that Barber’s appeal was an “eleventh-hour” attempt at halting his execution when the state had already made changes to assure that implementing its lethal injection protocol would not “superadd” pain to Barber’s death.

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.” 

The death penalty is inhumane and violates the fundamental right to life. Physician involvement enables this continuing abuse of human rights and undermines the four pillars of medical ethics—beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. “The death penalty is, in our common experience, an atavistic relic from the past that should be shed in the 21st century”, said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk in April, 2023, during the 52nd session of the Human Rights Council. The death penalty has existed since the Code of Hammurabi, with its history seeped in politics and discrimination. Physicians have been involved throughout this history. In the eyes of the public, the medicalisation and very involvement of physicians renders execution palatable, eroding any natural sense of abhorrence. Yet capital punishment is ineffective as a deterrent and morally wrong. At its core, execution is a barbaric practice that goes against the ethical foundation of the physician's rol...

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...

Frank Atwood is the next man scheduled to be executed in Arizona, on June 8. He was sentenced to death in Pima County in 1987 for the murder of an 8-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Because Atwood’s crimes occurred before the gas chamber was outlawed in Arizona in 1992, he has a choice between death by lethal gas or lethal injection. His attorneys argue both methods would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. They say the lethal injection would cause Atwood a “tortuous” amount of pain because he suffers from a spinal condition, and would likely have to be restrained while laying down to a gurney for more than 20 minutes. A review performed by Atwood’s attorneys of 14 previous lethal injections in Arizona prior to Clarence Dixon’s found the total IV insertion time ranged from 7 minutes, all the way up to 54 minutes, with a median time of 23 minutes. “The time that patently unqualified people spend attempting to install an IV line is just one of the steps the department takes afte...

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...

Oklahoma pays a doctor $15,000 per execution for duties that include performing a consciousness check and verifying death during the lethal injection process. A top corrections official testified about the payments Monday during a hearing in Oklahoma City federal court. The doctor, who was not identified, does not administer the 3 drugs used to carry out the death penalty in Oklahoma. The doctor and an IV team, however, are involved in verifying the drugs are correct and in placing the IV lines. Justin Farris, the chief of operations at the Oklahoma Corrections Department, recruited the doctor last year. He said the doctor also is paid $1,000 a day for participating in training leading up to executions.  That training usually takes place once a week and twice on the week an execution is scheduled, according to his testimony. The hearing Monday involved a request by two inmates for execution stays. RELATED | Oklahoma death row inmates seek firing squad as alternative Donald A. Grant...

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...

Private executioners paid in cash. Middle-of-the-night killings. False or incomplete justifications. ProPublica obtained court records showing how the outgoing administration is using its final days to execute the most federal prisoners since World War II. In its hurry to use its final days in power to execute federal prisoners, the administration of President Donald Trump has trampled over an array of barriers, both legal and practical, according to court records that have not been previously reported. Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases. They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as “moot” because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a qual...