In an unusual move, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee granted Tony Carruthers a one-year stay of execution after his execution failed. Carruthers was convicted of murdering three people in an infamous incident in 1994.
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Tennessee halted the execution of a death row inmate convicted of triple murder after the executioner failed to insert a backup intravenous line, and the governor granted a one-year reprieve, the state Department of Corrections told USA TODAY.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections said its enforcement team “quickly” established Tony Carruthers’ main IV line on Thursday, May 21, but “were unable to find another suitable vein” for the backup line required by the state’s lethal injection protocol.
After the backup line failed, “the team attempted to insert a central line as per protocol, but the procedure failed,” the ministry said.
One of Carruthers’ attorneys, Amy Harwell, told the Commercial Appeal, part of the USA TODAY Network, that Carruthers was in pain and there was “a lot of blood” as the executioner tried to find a vein.
Carruthers was scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. CT. Almost two hours later, at 11:52 a.m., Harwell told the Commercial Appeal the executioner removed the intravenous line from his client.
In an unprecedented move after a failed execution, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee granted Carruthers a one-year suspended sentence. He made no further comment.
The last lethal injection failure in the United States was in 2024, when the state of Idaho halted the execution of serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech after the executioner had trouble installing an IV line.
Problems with IV insertion have persisted since the country’s first lethal injection in 1982, and an analysis published by the Death Penalty Information Center found that IVs are the execution method most likely to cause problems.
Here’s what you need to know:
Learn more about the Tony Carruthers case
Prosecutors say that on February 24, 1994, Tony Carruthers and James Montgomery committed three murders as part of a plan to take over a drug trade near Memphis and prove to everyone how ruthless they were.
According to court records, they targeted a 21-year-old drug dealer named Marcellos Anderson, his innocent mother, and a 17-year-old friend, taking them to an empty grave that had already been dug for a funeral scheduled for a local cemetery. As the three victims begged for their lives, prosecutors allege Carruthers and Montgomery shot them to death, rolled them all into their graves and covered them with plywood and dirt, according to court records. Anderson’s mother, a 43-year-old housewife named Delois Anderson, was buried alive and suffocated.
The funeral was held promptly as planned, and a person was buried on top of the hidden body. Court records say the crime might not have been discovered if Montgomery’s brother hadn’t told police what happened and directed them to the cemetery.
The infamous Memphis case has gained national attention in recent weeks amid a fight for forensic evidence and fingerprint testing that lawyers say could prove Carruthers’ innocence. Kim Kardashian recently asked Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to postpone the execution to allow for testing, and the American Civil Liberties Union has joined his lawyers in the fight.
“We know there is no physical evidence that matches Tony,” Lucas Cameron Vaughn, interim legal director for the ACLU of Tennessee, said earlier this month. “Investigators recovered fingerprints from the house where the victim was abducted and from the very places the kidnapper would have touched. None of those fingerprints matched Tony. To this day, his identity remains unknown.”
Lee said in a May 19 statement that after “careful consideration” and a “thorough review of the case,” he did not intend to halt the execution.
More about lethal injection failure
An analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks U.S. executions, found that of more than 1,000 lethal injections performed in the United States between 1982 and 2010, 75 were considered botched — a rate of 7.2 percent, more than any other method of death, including shooting, gas, electrocution and hanging, the center said.
During the country’s first lethal injection in 1982, Texas executioners had trouble finding a suitable vein for Charles Brooks because he was so heavily drugged, writes Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University, in a forthcoming chapter titled “Six American Execution Methods and a Tragic Quest for Humanity.”
In 2022, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey suspended executions and called for an internal investigation after authorities experienced problems inserting IVs in multiple cases.
Factors such as dehydration, stress, room temperature, and certain illnesses can also make vein access difficult. Another problem may be a lack of experience among the people inserting IV lines during executions, Denno, founding director of the university’s Center for Neuroscience and Law, told USA TODAY in 2022.
“The people you and I go to get blood drawn may not be the same people who have done it thousands of times, right?” she said. “That means even though they are medical professionals, they may be working in lower-level jobs.”
Lawyers speak out over Carruthers’ botched execution
Casey Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Death Penalty Project, called repeated efforts to find an IV line for Carruther “barbaric.”
“Permitting the execution of Tony Carruthers without ordering DNA testing was a grave injustice,” Stubbs said in a statement. “This injustice became barbaric when Tennessee’s efforts to set up a lethal drug IV line failed and the executioners continued to proceed with the botched execution anyway.”
Melanie Verdescia, one of Carruther’s attorneys, told Commercial Appeal that Tennessee is “torturing a man who claims to be innocent in the name of justice.”
“This is not how our system is supposed to work,” Verdescia said.
What’s next for Tony Carruthers?
It was not immediately clear what the next steps would be in Tony Carruthers’ case, but the moratorium granted by Lee could last for many more months or even years.
When the state of Idaho halts Creech’s execution in 2024, the schedule remains unchanged and he remains on death row.
This story has been updated to add new information.
