Tony Carruthers’ execution was called off Thursday and he was given a one-year reprieve after the state Department of Corrections struggled to find a vein to set a backup injection line.
“Medical personnel quickly established a primary IV line; however, the team was unable to immediately establish a backup line pursuant to the lethal injection execution protocol,” a statement from the Tennessee Department of Correction said.
In a statement, Gov. Bill Lee said he was granting Carruthers reprieve from execution for a year.
In addition to unsuccessful attempts to find a second vein to establish a backup line, personnel were unable to insert a central line, TDOC said.
“The execution was then called off,” the statement said.
Before the execution was called off, attorneys for Carruthers filed an emergency stay of execution Thursday, claiming corrections has been unable to set an IV line to administer lethal injection drugs.
“The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) has been unable to obtain intravenous access to administer lethal injection to Mr. Carruthers,” the emergency motion, filed in state and federal courts in Tennessee, said. “Repeated attempts to obtain access at alternate IV sites have been unsuccessful.”
Federal public defender Amy Harwell told NBC News that the execution is paused and that Carruthers is “off the gurney” and being medically assessed.
“The State of Tennessee is currently torturing a man who maintains his innocence in the name of justice. This is not how our system is supposed to work,” said Melanie Verdecia, counsel for Carruthers alongside the American Civil Liberties Union.
Carruthers was the first person scheduled to be executed in Tennessee this year.
On Wednesday, lawyers for Carruthers said they were worried that the state was using expired drugs for the execution.
“Mr. Carruthers’ lawyers have repeatedly sought assurances from TDOC that expired drugs would not be used in the execution on Thursday. TDOC has refused to provide any such explicit assurance,” the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee said in a statement.
Tennessee ended a three-year pause on executions last year. The moratorium came after it was discovered that the state was not properly testing lethal injection drugs for purity and potency.
An independent review later found that the drugs prepared for seven inmates in 2018 had not been fully tested.
Tennessee’s execution procedures are shrouded in secrecy. States that carry out executions go to great lengths to keep the sources of their execution drugs and their practices confidential.
Several states have had trouble procuring a drug often used in lethal injection, pentobarbital, because the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it object to its being used in executions. That has led states like Indiana, Utah and Texas to spend well above market rate to acquire the drugs from elsewhere.
An email from the Tennessee Department of Corrections to the state Comptroller of the Treasury obtained via a public records request showed the state spent $650,000 on execution-related expenses after the moratorium was lifted.
The Tennessee attorney general’s office has declined to comment.
Carruthers was convicted in the 1994 triple kidnapping and murder of Marcellos “Cello” Anderson; his mother, Delois Anderson; and Frederick Tucker.
Carruthers has maintained his innocence since his conviction. His current legal team has contended in multiple court filings that there was never any physical evidence linking Carruthers to the crime and that the state’s case against him was based on the testimony of a paid informant.
The victims’ bodies were discovered buried underneath a casket in a Memphis graveyard.
Investigators were led to the grave by a man named Jonathan Montgomery, which led police to his brother, James Montgomery, and Carruthers as suspects. A “blanket-like cloth” with blood on it was discovered in the grave with the bodies.
At trial, the state argued that Carruthers and his two co-defendants, James and Jonathan Montgomery, kidnapped Marcellos Anderson to rob him. Jonathan Montgomery was found hanged in his cell prior to trial. Carruthers and James Montgomery were tried together. Both were found guilty of three counts of first-degree premeditated murder and were sentenced to death in 1996.
Carruthers ultimately had six different attorneys before representing himself in a performance that his current attorneys described as “inept, ineffective and disastrous,” pointing to an ongoing mental illness and saying he was “mentally ill, irrational, and incompetent to stand trial” at the time of his arrest.
Later, an appeals court found that Montgomery was deprived of a fair trial because of Carruthers’ self-representation. His conviction was overturned and he was granted a new trial.
During the retrial, Montgomery requested DNA testing of the crime scene evidence. Last month, ACLU attorneys filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing to have unmatched fingerprints and other DNA evidence tested against that of an alternative suspect, claiming it would prove his innocence.
“Testing did not reveal any DNA matches to Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Carruthers on the evidence,” the motion said. “A majority of the samples were either too small to produce a profile under 2003 technology, were inconclusive, or matched the victims. However, there was one robust male profile on a white blanket that was buried with the victims.”
The request for DNA testing in Carruthers’ case was denied. The state offered Montgomery a plea to a reduced charge of three counts of second-degree murder. He was released from prison in 2015.
