Doctor Who Botched Christa Pike Execution Hadn’t Placed IV Since 2013
Dr. Mark Fowler, who supervised Christa Pike’s botched execution and served as the lead physician during another failed lethal injection just months earlier, had not placed an IV line in 13 years, according to court documents.
Fowler, appointed by the Tennessee Department of Corrections, oversaw the state’s unsuccessful execution attempts this year involving death row inmates Tony Carruthers and Christa Pike.
However, the 69-year-old doctor acknowledged in a deposition last year that he held no hospital privileges and lacked authorization to insert central IV lines at any medical facility, PEOPLE reported, citing the deposition record.
Fowler said he last held those privileges in 2013 and had not placed an IV in a patient since then.
Based on Fowler’s testimony, “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 that lack of recent experience, Tennessee selected Fowler to oversee Carruthers’ execution in May. Under the state’s Lethal Injection Execution Protocol, his responsibilities included “determining if the inmate is deceased” and “establishing a central line IV if necessary.”
Fowler and a three-person medical team spent more than an hour attempting to place two IVs in Carruthers during his scheduled execution on May 31. The procedure was ultimately abandoned, according to the outlet.
After the team failed to establish the two peripheral IV sites required to administer the lethal drugs, Fowler was brought in to help, Carruthers’ attorney, Maria DeLiberto of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a court filing obtained by PEOPLE.
Court documents said Fowler was unable to place a central line at either of two locations.
When the execution was called off, Carruthers was “groaning,” “clearly in pain” and repeatedly saying, “It hurts, it hurts,” DeLiberto told the court.
Fowler was nevertheless called upon again to assist with Pike’s catastrophic lethal injection in September.
During that execution, medical team members repeatedly failed to establish functioning IV lines in Pike’s arms. They warned that some of her veins may have ruptured, or “blown,” before eventually injecting her with pentobarbital, according to an October court filing by Pike’s attorney.
The IV team used roughly 10 needles and tried multiple sites on both arms. They even failed to push saline through the final IV site they established, attorney Randy Spivey wrote.
Investigators later found that Pike’s IV lines had been placed incorrectly, causing the pentobarbital to leak into the tissue in her arms rather than flow into her bloodstream.
Fowler acknowledged that mistakes had been made and said staff should have responded when Pike reported pain in her arm.
“They should have stopped and reassessed, and they didn’t,” he told New York Magazine in his first public comments since the failed execution.
After surviving two doses of the lethal drug, Pike was taken to a nearby hospital, where she remained in critical condition for 10 days. She was then returned to the prison’s medical ward.
