After trying and failing for over an hour to find a vein to inject a lethal injection drug into him, the Tennessee Department of Corrections ended its efforts to execute Tony Carruthers on Thursday.
“This was a tortured, botched execution,” Carruthers’ attorney, Maria DeLiberato, who was in the execution chamber, told WSMV 4. https://tinyurl.com/pw3taynp DeLiberato also noted that after failing to establish the central line, the execution team then tried IV lines in his arms, shoulders, foot, jugular, and chest.
Shortly after the botched attempt, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced he was granting Carruthers “a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.”
Tennessee has a history of problems with its lethal injection protocol. In 2022, Gov. Lee ordered a halt to Oscar Smith’s execution 30 minutes before he was to be killed, because corrections officials had discovered the drugs they planned to use had not been “properly tested.” Smith’s execution, and five others scheduled for the next few months, were put on hold. Lee then called for an independent investigation into the Tennessee Department of Corrections execution process, specifically, its guidelines on testing its lethal injection chemicals, the “clarity” of its manual on the lethal injection process, which hadn’t been updated since 2018, and the department’s staffing considerations. The result was a 166-page report that was exhaustive, unsparing, and damning.
DPF Board Member Dr. Philip D. Hansten, a pharmacology professor emeritus at the University of Washington, said at the time of the report’s release that what was most concerning for him was the lack of formal training for anyone on the execution team. “People with no formal training started the IVs, and they couldn’t do it; they had difficulty getting access to the person’s veins, so they’d try cutdowns (cutting into the arm or leg to locate a vein in which to insert the lethal injection drugs). It’s a procedure done by a physician, and even they hate doing them because they’re hard to do. Pharmacists, nurses, and doctors spend a lot of time studying and training to learn how to prepare and administer drugs.” It’s clearly not a job for laypeople.
But the real travesty in the case of Tony Carruthers is why the state was trying to kill him in the first place. His legal team, including the ACLU, maintains that Tennessee has refused to test “unidentified DNA and fingerprint evidence that does not match Mr. Carruthers and, if tested, could exonerate him.” His lawyers want this “unmatched forensic evidence to be compared to an alternative suspect identified in 2011 by Mr. Carruthers’s co-defendant.”
Carruthers was (with his codefendant, who was originally sentenced to death but later resentenced and released) convicted and sentenced to death for the 1994 kidnapping and murder of Marcellos Anderson, his mother, Delois Anderson, and Frederick Taylor.
Despite the fact that Carruthers has a severe mental illness, the courts allowed him to represent himself at his 1996 trial. His cross-examination of a prosecution witness was described by one of his attorneys as “one of the most singularly inept, ineffective, and disastrous cross-examinations possible. It seemed designed to secure not only a guilty verdict, but a death sentence.”