Tennessee set to execute man despite botched attempt on another prisoner

Tennessee is scheduled to execute a man this week despite bipartisan backlash after the state botched its previous lethal injection, which dragged on for more than an hour before it was canceled.

Darrell Hines, who was convicted of the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins, a motel maid and mother of four, is due to be put to death on Thursday.

Hines’s lawyers have asked the US supreme court to intervene, arguing that he could face a fate similar to Tony Carruthers, who endured a prolonged, failed execution in May.

Hines is one of three people slated to be executed on Thursday across the US as a handful of states continue to aggressively pursue capital punishment. Hines has maintained his innocence. Jenkins’ family has called on the execution to proceed.

Death row inmate Darrell Hines in Tennessee. Photograph: Tennessee Department of Correction/AP

Tennessee’s execution procedures are shrouded in secrecy. It is unclear how the state acquires, maintains and administers its lethal injection drugs, and attorneys have long warned the lack of oversight could result in protracted, agonizing killings and botched procedures.

On 21 May, during the failed execution of Carruthers, an IV team and a physician spent roughly an hour and 15 minutes struggling to establish an IV line to inject Carruthers with the lethal drugs, Maria DeLiberato, Carruthers’ attorney, said in a court declaration. The IV team pierced Carruthers all over his body more than a dozen times, causing him to groan in pain, said DeLiberato, senior counsel with the ACLU’s capital punishment project.

In a declaration, DeLiberato recalled her client being strapped to an execution gurney as the doctor and others on the IV team tried and failed to locate veins in his arms, hands, feet and shoulder, and then could not establish a central line in his jugular. A warden eventually paused the execution, and Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

When DeLiberato was able to see her client after the botched execution, she said he was “sweaty, pale, tearful, and he seemed to be in shock and pain”.

Hines is 66 years old, very thin, has suffered significant muscular atrophy after recent strokes and has stiffness in his arm that causes his hand to remain clenched in a fist – all factors that would make it challenging to establish an IV line, according to medical declarations filed by his lawyers.

Kit Thomas, one of Hines’s attorneys, noted her client was generally bed-bound or in a wheelchair: “It’s grotesque. It’s particularly horrifying to think of them lifting a partially paralyzed man from his hospital bed, which he’s lived in for the last eight months, then strapping him to a gurney, while executioners attempt to establish IV access.”

The names of officials carrying out executions are kept secret by state law, but the identity of a physician involved in Carruthers’ execution became public when a warden inadvertently disclosed it following another prisoner’s execution last year. That physician, Dr Mark Fowler, was subsequently deposed by death row attorneys. Under questioning, Fowler said the last time he had placed a central IV line was around 2013, the Guardian recently reported.

The Tennessee supreme court recently denied Hines’s request to force the state to confirm whether Fowler would be involved in his execution.

Fowler has objected to claims made by Hines’s attorneys that he was “unqualified” to perform executions. He declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about Carruthers’ execution, saying this was “a private situation. The inmate is entitled to privacy. The lawyers are churning up a lot of nonsense, and I don’t want to discuss it.”

Hines’s attorneys have also raised concerns about the management by Frank Strada of Tennessee’s department of correction, which oversees executions. Strada previously served as a deputy director of Arizona’s corrections department.

Arizona conducted three executions during Strada’s tenure, which Hines’s lawyers said in a statement to reporters were all “marked by prolonged and problematic attempts to establish IV access”. The attorneys have pointed to a 2023 court declaration from Ryan Thornell, Arizona’s corrections director, who said his review of execution procedures identified “several critical issues”, including “inadequate knowledge and expertise” of staff involved in executions, concerns about the efficacy of the lethal injection drugs and concerns about the IV team’s procedures.

In Arizona, Strada oversaw prison operations and supervised the assistant director managing executions, according to the Tennessean newspaper. One of the three executions took 40 minutes, according to the man’s attorney, and in two of the killings, staff cut open the prisoners’ groins to insert catheters after they failed to insert IVs into their arms.

In June, nine Republican state senators in Tennessee who support the death penalty wrote to the governor condemning Carruthers’ botched execution. They urged an independent review of what went wrong, including an accounting of whether staff were qualified to perform the procedures and “independent testing” of the execution drugs, saying deficiencies should be corrected before the state attempts another execution.

Lee, the governor, has declined to pause executions and has denied Hines’s clemency petition.

Hines’s attorneys have also asked Tennessee corrections officials whether staff have confirmed the execution drugs to be used Thursday were not expired, and if officials have done quality control testing and ensured the drugs were properly stored and handled.

The state has not responded to the lawyers’ questions.

Spokespeople for the governor, Tennessee’s corrections department and attorney general’s office did not respond to inquiries about Strada, Fowler and the other concerns raised by Hines’s lawyers.

Thomas said she was worried about the “pain, suffering and humiliating” Hines could endure through another prolonged, botched execution: “The trauma that such an event will inflict on everyone in the execution chamber is really unimaginable.”

On Thursday, executions are scheduled in Oklahoma and Alabama.