The doctor who oversaw Christa Pike’s failed execution has declined to comment after the Tennessee death-row inmate survived two doses of the lethal injection drug and was taken to hospital in a critical condition.
Dr Mark Fowler, 69, answered the door at his isolated family home near Union City, Tennessee, less than 24 hours after the execution attempt at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
“Thank you for coming. I have nothing to say,” he said from behind the screen door of the four-bedroom property.
Pike, 50, remains alive at an off-site medical facility, which has been identified by a local television station as Vanderbilt University Medical Center. One of her lawyers, Randy Spivey, said she was receiving “lifesaving care”, although her prognosis was not known.
The incident is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year to have been supervised by Fowler. His role in both cases has placed the doctor under renewed scrutiny.
Previous Tennessee execution also ended in failure
In May, Fowler was overseeing the execution of triple murderer Tony Carruthers when medical staff spent about 90 minutes trying and failing to establish an intravenous connection for the lethal drugs.
A complaint filed with the Tennessee Department of Health by Carruthers’ sister, Dr Tonya Hervey, alleges that Fowler took over the search for a vein about 40 minutes into the attempt. It claims he then decided to insert a central line, a large tube placed into a vein in the chest.
The complaint alleges that the needle was pushed into Carruthers’ chest while he was awake and groaning in pain. Hervey also claims Fowler was not qualified to perform the procedure because he had previously acknowledged in a deposition that he had not carried it out for more than a decade.
According to the complaint, Carruthers suffered a stroke and was left partially paralysed. Governor Bill Lee subsequently halted the execution and granted the 58-year-old a one-year reprieve.
Carruthers was convicted over the 1984 kidnapping and murders of Frederick Tucker, Marcellos Anderson and Anderson’s mother, Delois.
Fowler has previously declined to comment on the allegations. In a statement to NBC, he said: “Every attempt was made to minimize the defendant’s discomfort in the case at hand.”
He could face formal disciplinary charges if the Tennessee Department of Health finds evidence of a violation during its review.
Fowler’s professional background includes work as an emergency and family doctor. He gained a law degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1984, worked for three years as a public defender and retrained as a physician in 1996.
He began working as an emergency physician at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Covington, Tennessee, in 2008. Since November 2012, he has held the position of corporate medical director and director of regulatory affairs at Interstate Blood Bank, according to his professional profile.
He is reportedly paid 3,000 dollars to oversee each Tennessee execution and was also involved in the execution of Byron Black in August last year. Black’s lawyer described that execution as “100 percent botched”; he reportedly cried out in pain and said, “I can’t do this” and “it hurts so bad” before he was pronounced dead ten minutes later.
Christa Pike remains in critical condition
Pike’s lawyers said the execution team spent about an hour trying to administer the lethal drugs as it struggled to find a vein. Spivey said he counted at least seven needles in her left arm.
After the first dose, which should have killed her, Pike was said to have sung, laughed and blessed people in the witnesses’ room. Following the second failed dose, she began snoring, her lawyer said.
Witnesses were then escorted from the area as Pike was taken to hospital. More than 24 hours later, her legal team said she was still critically ill.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong. Governor Lee ordered a review of the incident, calling it “deeply disturbing”, and indefinitely postponed Pike’s execution and another scheduled for later this year.
President Donald Trump criticised Tennessee officials over the failure. “How does that happen?” he said. “Should be easy to do. It shouldn’t be very difficult.”
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of her Knoxville Job Corps classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike and her boyfriend were both convicted in connection with the fatal stabbing.
The killing prompted fears of Satan worship at the time after a pentagram was carved on Slemmer’s body. Pike has never disputed that she helped kill Slemmer, while supporters have argued that her mental illness and allegations of severe sexual abuse should have been taken into account.
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder shortly after the killing. Her lawyers are now seeking to have her death sentence commuted.
