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.
First, he had to numb the area where he would cut Carruthers with a scalpel and then pierce the vein with a large needle. But before he applied the lidocaine, he asked the IV team if “the patient” was allergic.
It was a strange choice of words. Carruthers was not a patient, and the room was not an OR.
Fowler had entered the death chamber at Riverbend maximum security prison in Nashville, Tennessee. Carruthers, condemned to death for a triple murder in 1994 for which there was no forensic evidence and over which he has always maintained his innocence, was forcibly strapped to the gurney.
The tube Fowler was attempting to insert would pipe the sedative pentobarbital at a lethally high dose.
Standing just a few feet away inside the chamber was Carruthers’ lawyer, Maria DeLiberato, a senior counsel at the ACLU’s capital punishment project.
She heard the doctor’s description of her client, and recoiled.
“He called Tony ‘the patient’,” she said. “And he was trying to kill him.”
Mark Walton Fowler, 68, of Union City, Tennessee, is an exceedingly rare breed: a doctor who signed up to participate in executions, and whose identity has become public.
In most cases, execution physicians are shielded by ironclad secrecy laws, allowing them to carry out their controversial work shrouded in anonymity.
Fowler has not been so lucky. He was identified, paradoxically, by the Tennessee department of corrections. A warden inadvertently let slip his name as he announced the death by lethal injection of another death row prisoner, Byron Black, 69, last August.
The public disclosure has clearly inconvenienced Fowler. Two months after his name was released, he was subpoenaed by lawyers acting for prisoners challenging the constitutionality of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.
