Tennessee Republican State Senators Call on Governor Lee to Review the ​“Incompetent Administration” Leading to the Botched Execution of Tony Carruthers

In a let­ter dat­ed June 25, 2026, a group of nine Tennessee Republican sen­a­tors called on Governor Bill Lee to com­mis­sion an inde­pen­dent review of the failed exe­cu­tion of Tony Carruthers, to order the cor­rec­tion of ​“every defi­cien­cy” found in this review, and to make infor­ma­tion about the exe­cu­tion team pub­licly avail­able ​“so that the Department [of Corrections’] readi­ness can be inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied.” While the sen­a­tors main­tain their sup­port for the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty, they note they ​“can­not accept its incom­pe­tent admin­is­tra­tion” and that the failed exe­cu­tion of Mr. Carruthers ​“was a fail­ure of the State of Tennessee to car­ry out a law­ful sen­tence of its own courts.”

On May 21, 2026, Tennessee attempt­ed to exe­cute Tony Carruthers but failed to do so after exe­cu­tion team mem­bers could not estab­lish an intra­venous line after more than an hour of attempts, prompt­ing Gov. Lee to grant a one-year reprieve. In a writ­ten state­ment, the Tennessee Department of Corrections said med­ical per­son­nel had quick­ly estab­lished a pri­ma­ry IV but were unable to estab­lish a back­up line as required by the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. Efforts to insert a cen­tral line also failed, and offi­cials called off the exe­cu­tion. As not­ed by the sen­a­tors, ​“this fail­ure was not the first” of its kind. A 2022 inde­pen­dent review, com­mis­sioned by Gov. Lee, found that the state repeat­ed­ly failed to fol­low its own pro­to­cols in per­form­ing and prepar­ing for eight exe­cu­tions between 2018 and 2022. The let­ter to Gov. Lee notes that the same ques­tion that prompt­ed this review exists today: ​“whether the Department is com­pe­tent­ly dis­charg­ing the duties the law has placed in its hands.”

Within hours of Mr. Carruthers’ botched exe­cu­tion, attor­neys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office filed a 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 for a sep­a­rate law­suit chal­leng­ing the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col, 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 — includ­ing one that erro­neous­ly end­ed with a guide wire in the patient’s carotid vein. 

A mem­ber of Mr. Carruthers’ fam­i­ly told MLK50, a non­prof­it news out­let, that they believe Mr. Carruthers ​“is still in trau­ma” from the failed exe­cu­tion. ​“He’s not com­mu­ni­cat­ing like he used to. He is still strug­gling to walk and can’t use his right hand.” On June 12, coun­sel for Mr. Carruthers con­firmed for reporters that he is still expe­ri­enc­ing health issues near­ly a month after the failed exe­cu­tion attempt. ​“We are still fight­ing to get an out­side doc­tor in to see him,” a fam­i­ly spokesper­son told MLK50.Following their client’s botched exe­cu­tion, coun­sel for Mr. Carruthers called on TDOC to allow an inde­pen­dent physi­cian to assess Mr. Carruthers’ cur­rent health con­di­tion, but the Department denied this request.