Tennessee stops execution after failing to find inmate's vein for lethal drugs, attorney says
Medical staff found no suitable backup vein, and the state will wait at least a year before trying again, Gov. Bill Lee said.
- On Thursday, Tennessee officials halted the execution of Tony Carruthers after the Tennessee Department of Correction failed to establish an intravenous line; repeated attempts by medics to secure access for lethal-injection drugs were unsuccessful.
- Before the scheduled procedure, attorneys for Carruthers expressed concerns regarding potential use of expired drugs, with the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee reporting that TDOC refused to provide explicit assurances.
- Tennessee resumed executions last year, ending a three-year pause caused by drug testing failures, though an independent review later found that drugs used on seven inmates in 2018 had been fully tested.
- Last month, legal counsel filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing to examine unmatched fingerprints and other evidence against an alternate suspect, advancing ongoing efforts by attorneys for Carruthers ahead of the scheduled execution.
- Melanie Verdecia, counsel for Carruthers with the ACLU, stated, "This is not how our system is supposed to work," while NBC News reported that Governor Bill Lee and the Tennessee Department of Corrections received comment requests the attorney general's office declined.
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Questions raised about the doctor who was overseeing Tony Carruthers’ execution
Questions are mounting about the doctor overseeing Tony Carruthers’ halted execution after attorneys alleged he lacked the qualifications to perform the invasive IV procedures attempted during the process.
The execution of a 57-year-old man convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in the US state of Tennessee was postponed on Thursday. The killer, Tony Carruthers, was already bedridden, but the execution was postponed for at least a year after it took more than an hour to find a suitable vein to insert a tube to administer the lethal drug.
Tennessee calls off botched execution attempt as witness saw inmate ‘wincing and groaning’
Tennessee officials on Thursday called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, after his executioners tried and failed for over an hour to establish an intravenous line. Gov. Bill Lee announced soon afterward that the state would not try again for at least a year.
There's No Good Way to Execute a Person
Regardless of anyone’s specific opinion on the moral and ethical grounds of capital punishment as a deterrent or an act of state barbarism, the fact of the matter is this: the actual, mechanical process of killing a convicted criminal should not, in theory, be particularly difficult. Life is tenuous; it can take surprisingly little to rob us of it. In theory, it should be extremely simple to provide a painless death to someone who has been sente…
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