The doctor who oversaw Christa Pike’s botched execution and served as the lead physician in another failed lethal injection just months prior hadn’t placed an IV line in 13 years, court documents revealed.
Dr. Mark Fowler, who was appointed by the Tennessee Department of Corrections, was the physician in charge of the failed executions this year of death row inmates Tony Carruthers and Christa Pike.
But Fowler, 69, stunningly admitted in a deposition last year that he didn’t have any hospital privileges or privileges to insert a central IV line at any medical facility, PEOPLE reported, citing the deposition record.
Fowler explained he last had those privileges in 2013 — and had not placed an IV in a patient since then.
Based on Fowler’s deposition, “he does not have the current experience or training that would be required to obtain or retain privileges to place central lines at many, if not most, major healthcare institutions today,” Dr Gail A. Van Norman, professor emeritus of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Washington said in a declaration obtained by the publication.
Despite this, Fowler was appointed by the state to oversee the execution of Carruthers in May — a role in which he was responsible for “determining if the inmate is deceased” but also with “establishing a central line IV if necessary,” according to Tennessee’s Lethal Injection Execution Protocol.
Fowler and a three-person team spent over an hour trying to insert two IVs into Carruthers during his planned May 31 execution, before it was eventually called off, according to the outlet.
After the medical team was unable to establish two peripheral IV sites needed to inject Carruthers with lethal drugs, Fowler was called in to assist, the inmate’s attorney Maria DeLiberto, of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a court filing obtained by PEOPLE.
Fowler wasn’t able to insert a central line in two locations, court papers said.
By the time the failed execution was called off, a “groaning” Carruthers was “clearly in pain” and said, “It hurts, it hurts,” DeLiberto told the court.
Yet Fowler was once again called to serve during Pike’s catastrophic lethal injection in September.
During her botched execution, team members failed multiple times to establish working IV lines in Pike’s arms and warned that some of her veins may have ruptured or “blown,” before she was injected with pentobarbital, according to a court document filed by Pike’s attorney in October.
The IV team went through about 10 needles and tried several spots on both of her arms — and even failed to push saline through the last IV site they established, attorney Randy Spivey wrote.
Investigators later determined that Pike’s IV lines had been improperly placed and caused the pentobarbital to seep into the tissue in her arms instead of entering her bloodstream.
Fowler admitted mistakes were made, saying staff should have responded when Pike complained of arm pain.
“They should have stopped and reassessed, and they didn’t,” he told New York Magazine in his first public comments since the fiasco.
After surviving two doses of the lethal drug, Pike was rushed to a nearby hospital where she remained in critical condition for 10 days before being released back to the prison’s medical ward.
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