Botched execution attempt buys Tennessee man another year

WASHINGTON (CN) — In a last-minute emergency order, the Supreme Court on Thursday refused to stop Tennessee’s planned execution of a man fighting to prove his innocence in a triple murder.

Tony Carruthers was sentenced to death 30 years ago after being forced to represent himself at trial and without any physical evidence tying him to the crime. He filed a last-minute emergency appeal seeking an execution stay from the high court, claiming that untested DNA and fingerprint evidence could exonerate him.

However, hours after the high court’s ruling, Tennessee corrections officials called off Carruthers’ execution scheduled for Thursday morning after failing to establish a backup IV line as required by lethal injection protocols.

“The team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein,” a corrections official said. “The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful.”

Botched lethal injection attempts have become common in recent years. In 2022, Alabama was forced to put the practice on hold after three unsuccessful executions. Death row prisoners subsequently began choosing alternative methods like oxygen deprivation and firing squads to avoid complications.

According to Carruthers’ attorney, prison officials spent over an hour attempting to set an IV line while he groaned in pain.

“Permitting Tony Carruthers’s execution to move forward without ordering DNA testing was already a profound injustice,” Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said. “Today, that injustice became outright barbaric after Mr. Carruthers was subject to a botched execution attempt.”

After the 90-minute execution attempt, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve. Earlier in the week, Lee refused to halt the execution despite a petition signed by over 130,000 people.

Carruthers, now 59, and an accomplice were found guilty of kidnapping, torturing and burying alive Delois Anderson, her son Marcellos Anderson and a friend, Frederick Tucker, in 1994.

During his 1996 trial, a judge found that Carruthers had impliedly waived his right to appointed counsel. Carruthers’ attorneys said his pro se defense was so catastrophic and prejudicial that his co-defendant’s convictions and death sentences were reversed.

One prejudicial action included Carruthers calling Alfredo Shaw to testify. Shaw had claimed Carruthers confessed to him. But unbeknownst to Carruthers and the jury, Shaw was a paid informant for Tennessee. In a television interview before the trial began, Shaw admitted the police pressured and paid him to testify falsely.

After he was convicted, Carruthers appealed and sought DNA testing of a blanket found with the victims’ bodies. An expert witness for Carruthers’ co-defendant, James Montgomery, determined the DNA on the blanket didn’t belong to either man.

Tennessee offered Montgomery a plea deal based on the DNA testing, and he was subsequently released in 2015.

Under state law, mandatory post-conviction DNA testing must be conducted if a reasonable probability exists that the defendant would not have been prosecuted or convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained during their trial.

But Carruthers’ lawyers said his requests for DNA testing have been denied by Tennessee courts based on arbitrary and irrational constructions of federal and state rules. They compared his case to Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man who was released from prison last week after the Supreme Court ordered a new trial in light of prosecutorial misconduct in his decades-old conviction.

“Unfortunately, our system gets it wrong sometimes,” Carruthers’ lawyers wrote, noting that both Carruthers and Glossip have maintained their innocence throughout their convictions and sentences.

Carruthers lawyers said they will continue to push for forensic testing to prevent the state from trying to execute him a second time.

“Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence,” DeLiberato said.

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