Gov. Lee grants Carruthers yearlong execution reprieve after failure to set IV

The Tennessee Department of Correction called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after repeated attempts to find a vein for lethal injection failed.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee then granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve from execution. The Tennessee Supreme Court sets execution dates.

Carruthers, sentenced to death for a 1994 triple murder in Memphis, was scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. May 21 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

According to a statement from TDOC, medical personnel "quickly established a primary IV line." They could not set a backup line as required by the TDOC execution protocol.

"The team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein. The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful," the statement says. "The execution was then called off."

Executioners attempted to insert an IV line into Carruthers' veins for about an hour and 20 minutes, said Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project. They tried his arms, shoulders, foot, jugular and chest.

It took about 20 minutes, according to Deliberato, for the first IV to be inserted.

When the doctor attempted a central line, DeLiberato said, Carruthers was in pain. According to the Cleveland Clinic, a central line is a long, flexible, plastic tube that sends medicines into a large vein in the middle of the chest. The lidocaine had not set in before the central line procedure and grunts heard by witnesses were from Carruthers, she said.

DeLiberato described the attempt, which included Carruthers being “stabbed” two or three times to establish the line, as “torture."

“What a sign to test the DNA,” DeLiberato said. Carruthers' attorneys have repeatedly petitioned the courts to stop his execution and test DNA and fingerprint evidence from the scene of the crime. They believe it may point to an alternate suspect.

When informed of the one-year reprieve, DeLiberato started to cry.

"I am so grateful that we are going to have a chance to prove what we've been saying and what Tony has been saying for 30 years, that he didn't commit this crime," she said. "I cannot wait to tell his family."

Carruthers, according to representatives from TDOC, declined to have a final meal ahead of his execution. He also told his family not to attend the execution.

Witnesses hear muffled voices ask about pain

After the execution was called off by TDOC, media witnesses, including a reporter from The Commercial Appeal, gave their accounts of what happened inside the execution chamber.

This was the first execution in years for which journalists were allowed in the witness room as IV lines were being set.

In January, a Nashville judge ordered TDOC to allow reporters to witness the full execution of prisoners, from the time they enter the execution chamber until they are pronounced dead. Under the previous process, official witnesses saw just a 10-15 minute window of the execution.

The blinds over the window between the witness room and the execution chamber were never lifted. No media witnesses saw Carruthers for the duration of the attempts to insert a line.

A woman’s voice and a man’s voice could both be heard through the crack beneath the door, though their words were difficult to make out.

Generally, during executions, a speaker plays audio from the execution room after the curtains are raised. While in the witness room, those speakers were not on Thursday.

At one point, a man could be heard asking, "What’s the pain like?” and asked a person, presumably Carruthers, to rate his pain on a scale from 1-10.

Shortly after that, pained groans could be heard. DeLiberato, after the execution was called off, told reporters those groans were from Carruthers and happened when the central line was attempted on his chest.

DeLiberato said she also questioned the doctors’ qualifications while they attempted to insert the central line. According to her, she was told by her co-counsel that the doctor called in to help insert a secondary line “gave a sworn deposition that he was not qualified to do a central line.”

“So I went back in and I objected to him doing a central line,” DeLiberato said. “The doctor, himself, kind of snapped back at me and said, ‘Yes, I am qualified.’ The warden told him to just do his job.”

At around 11:45 a.m., a man told Carruthers they would bring him back to his cell.

“We’re going to sit you up nice and slow,” someone inside the execution chamber could be heard saying. “Slow, slow, slow.”

Attorneys: 'Botched execution'

Casey Stubbs, director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, called the repeated efforts to find an IV line "barbaric."

"Permitting Tony Carruthers' execution without ordering DNA testing was a grave injustice," Stubbs said in an emailed statement provided by an ACLU spokesperson. "This injustice turned barbaric when Tennessee’s efforts to set an IV line for the lethal drugs failed and the executioners continued to press forward anyway with the botched execution."

Melanie Verdecia, pro bono counsel for Carruthers, said the state was "torturing a man who maintains his innocence in the name of justice."

"This is not how our system is supposed to work," Verdecia said.

In recent years, Alabama postponed two executions after executioners couldn't find a vein to administer the lethal injection. In 2022, the state delayed the executions of Kenneth Eugene Smith and Alan Eugene Miller. Smith eventually became the first person in the U.S. to be executed by nitrogen gas in 2024. Miller was executed by the same method later that year.

David Raybin, a defense attorney and expert in criminal law, said he expects a "barrage of litigation" over the failed execution, both from Carruthers' attorneys and others on death row. People challenging their executions will have an example of the risk they may face if they are put to death.

"You can say, 'Well, we told you so,'" Raybin said.

What happened May 21 was not justice for Carruthers or for the victims' families, Raybin said.

"And it was preventable," Raybin said. "The government could have foreseen this and had taken precautions."

Protesters feel an odd sense of celebration

Michael Sample, a former death row inmate and supporter of Carruthers, was in the demonstration area outside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution when he found out the execution was called off. Pastor Kevin Riggs, of Franklin Community Church, was the one to tell the dwindling group awaiting updates.

"We said God is good," Sample said. "It had to be a higher power or something."

Sample last spoke to Carruthers on May 18 during a visit to the prison. He told him to keep his head up and hold onto hope.

"I want to say to him that I'm glad they didn't carry it through," Sample said. "And I hope he gets the relief he seeks."

"I felt obligated to go there today because I have been in that situation," he said. "Nobody wants to be in that situation, facing that."

Brennan Perkins, a Vanderbilt University Divinity School student, was also in the demonstration area. Before the execution was set to take place, he said he had no hope and came to the prayer vigil expecting something close to a funeral.

Instead, when he heard Riggs say the execution was called off, there was an "odd" sense of celebration.

"It feels like delaying the inevitable," Perkins said. "But a win is a win. There's still something worth celebrating here."

Why is Tony Carruthers on death row?

In 1994, the bodies of three people — Delois Anderson, Marcellos Anderson and Frederick Tucker — were found buried beneath the coffin of Dorothy Daniels. Police had been led to the grave by a soon-to-be codefendant of Carruthers and James Montgomery.

That codefendant, James Montgomery's brother Jonathan Montgomery, would ultimately point the finger at Carruthers and James Montgomery for planning the killings, but would die by suicide before the case reached trial.

A limited amount of physical evidence was presented at trial, with the bulk of it coming in the form of testimony from other drug dealers and inmates who knew Carruthers.

Testimony presented at trial alleged Carruthers organized a plot to kidnap, rob, and kill Marcellos Anderson, a known drug dealer in Memphis. When Carruthers and the Montgomery brothers arrived at Delois Anderson's house, they told her to call Marcellos Anderson to come home.

Marcellos Anderson arrived with Frederick Tucker, a 17-year-old who was not involved in any criminal enterprise, and the three victims were kidnapped.

Eventually, they were all brought to a grave that had been dug at Memphis' Rose Hill Cemetery. Daniels was set to be buried the next morning, so they dug under the pre-constructed grave. The three victims were strangled or shot before being dropped into a small grave beneath the one that Daniels would be buried in.

Daniels, as intended, was buried on top of the bodies without the cemetery crew knowing there was a grave below hers.

A medical examiner would testify at trial that the three victims, despite being strangled and shot, had been buried alive. He would later recant that testimony in an affidavit, saying he could not say with the utmost medical certainty they had been alive when buried.

Carruthers would also represent himself at trial. Leading up to the trial beginning, Carruthers had six different defense attorneys appointed to represent him. Each of them would eventually ask to be removed as his attorney due to threats from Carruthers.

The lack of physical evidence presented at trial would become the subject of legal challenges filed by Carruthers' attorneys, members of the ACLU of Tennessee. In the weeks before his execution, the ACLU filed motion after motion, and appeal after appeal, to have DNA and fingerprint evidence tested.

The ACLU argued this evidence could exonerate Carruthers, but the courts all denied the requests to have the evidence tested.

Lucas Finton covers crime, policing, jails, the courts and criminal justice policy for The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached by phone or email: (901)208-3922 and [email protected], and followed on X @LucasFinton.