New Delhi, Aug. 14 -- NASHVILLE - Dr. Mark Walton Fowler stepped to the glass shortly after 10 o'clock Wednesday night and declared Anthony Darrell Hines dead. The physician had done this before. The last time he occupied a central role in a Tennessee execution, witnesses described the prisoner suffering visibly before the procedure was halted. The calls for Fowler's removal that followed went unmet.

Hines, 61, was the first person Tennessee executed in 2026. He had been on death row since 1986, when a jury convicted him of the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old motel maid stabbed to death at a Kingston Springs hotel. He won a resentencing hearing but received the death penalty again in 1989. The case had not been conte...