The family of Tennessee Death Row inmate Tony Carruthers filed a complaint against the doctor overseeing the execution due to problems inserting an IV, which led to the execution being called off and delayed for a year.

TW: details of execution attempt

The complaint filed last Wednesday with the Tennessee Department of Health by Tonya Hervey says Tony Carruthers suffered excruciating pain during the May 21 attempt to administer a lethal injection and the family believes he now has partial paralysis that they attribute to a stroke. During the attempted execution, the IV team established a primary line right away but then worked for more than an hour trying to insert a backup line.

Maria DeLiberato, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing Carruthers, witnessed the attempts and said the team tried to insert an IV in Carruthers’ arm, hand and foot before Dr. Mark Fowler attempted to insert a central line.

“If the state of Tennessee is going to exe­cute its own, there has to be full and com­plete trans­paren­cy. There was no trans­paren­cy here and this botched exe­cu­tion showed why there must be,” DeLiberato stated.

The complaint accuses Fowler of violating medical ethics by participating in an execution; by injecting Carruthers with the anesthetic lidocaine without first establishing that he was not allergic to it; and by continuing the search for a vein despite his “visible agony and distress.” The complaint also says he was unqualified to place a central line because he had not done so in over a decade.

Within hours of the botched exe­cu­tion, attor­neys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office filed a new fed­er­al law­suit nam­ing Dr. Mark Walton Fowler as the physi­cian tasked with estab­lish­ing IV access and alleged he had not placed a cen­tral IV line in a patient in over a decade. In a depo­si­tion, Dr. Fowler stat­ed he last placed a cen­tral line around 2013, when he worked in an emer­gency room, and that he had placed a dozen or more cen­tral lines dur­ing his career — one that end­ed with a guide wire in the patient’s carotid vein. Dr. Fowler con­firmed in a depo­si­tion that he has no cur­rent hos­pi­tal priv­i­leges, mean­ing no hos­pi­tal has autho­rized him to prac­tice or per­form pro­ce­dures at its facility. 

Carruthers has maintained his innocence of a 1994 kidnapping and murder in Memphis. At tri­al, Carruthers was forced to rep­re­sent him­self because his tri­al judge became frus­trat­ed with his repeat­ed dis­missal of court-appoint­ed coun­sel, which his coun­sel argued was ​“due to his long­stand­ing and well-doc­u­ment­ed men­tal ill­ness.” Mr. Carruthers did not ask to rep­re­sent him­self at tri­al and repeat­ed­ly request­ed legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Post-con­vic­tion attor­neys for Mr. Carruthers wrote in a 2019 fil­ing that his per­for­mance at tri­al was ​“one of the most sin­gu­lar­ly inept, inef­fec­tive, and dis­as­trous cross-exam­i­na­tions pos­si­ble, one that seemed designed to secure not only a guilty ver­dict, but a death sen­tence.”

Counsel for Mr. Carruthers have unsuc­cess­ful­ly argued that their client can­not legal­ly be exe­cut­ed because of his severe men­tal ill­ness. According to a fil­ing from February 2026, Mr. Carruthers has a ​“per­va­sive and all-con­sum­ing obses­sion that a cabal of cor­rupt judges, pros­e­cu­tors, and defense attor­neys have con­spired to secure his con­vic­tion and death sen­tence.” The fil­ing also not­ed that Mr. Carruthers has called the Tennessee Federal Public Defender’s office as often as 300 times in one day.