Tennessee governor gives reprieve to inmate after botched execution 

Gov. Bill Lee issued a one-year reprieve Thursday for Tennessee death row inmate Tony Carruthers after a failed execution attempt.

According to the Tennessee Department of Correction, medical personnel tapped a primary vein to deliver the drugs for lethal injection but were unsuccessful in finding a backup vein as dictated by execution protocol. 

Maria DiLiberato of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, one of the lawyers representing Carruthers, attended the attempted execution and said Carruthers groaned in pain after the state tried for more than an hour to find a vein. 

 “Permitting Tony Carruthers’s execution to move forward without ordering DNA testing was already a profound injustice. Today, that injustice became outright barbaric after Mr. Carruthers was subject to a botched execution attempt,” said DiLiberto in a statement.

Groups that oppose the death penalty were quick to respond. 

“Today’s botched execution attempt of Tony Carruthers is horrifying but not surprising,” said Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, in a statement. “Not only did our state force Mr. Carruthers to represent himself at his own trial, convict him based on the testimony of a paid informant with no physical evidence, and deny him testing of DNA evidence that could have exonerated him, but now our state has tortured him too.”

Carruthers has spent more than 30 years on Tennessee’s death row after his conviction for first-degree murder in a 1994 triple kidnapping and murder in Memphis. 

Advocates for Carruthers, including state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, have argued for the execution to be called off, citing a lack of physical evidence connecting Carruthers to the crimes, testimony against him by paid informants and Carruthers’ alleged mental incompetence. After breaking with a series of court-appointed attorneys, he represented himself at trial. 

Thursday’s scheduled execution would have been the fourth in less than a year, following a three-year hiatus ordered by Lee in 2022 to review the state’s lethal injection protocol. 

“There is no principled reason to allow the state to resume executions before the court has an opportunity to hear all the evidence about whether TDOC is sourcing its lethal chemicals legally, whether those chemicals are contaminated, unexpired, and undiluted, and whether the execution team is capable of carrying out its duties competently and constitutionally. Tennessee can do better than this,” said Kelley Henry, an attorney for a group of death row prisoners, in 2025.