What Happened to Tony Carruthers Is Horrifying

Used needles clinked into the plastic medical-waste bin in the death chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Tony Carruthers was strapped to a gurney for his scheduled execution on May 21, but as his attorney Maria De Liberato watched the medical team repeatedly try and fail to access her client’s veins, she knew something was going terribly wrong. The medics whispered and gestured to one another. One asked for bigger needles, then smaller ones. Another grunted softly while shoving needles into Carruthers’s arm. DeLiberato, who had entered the chamber when the process began at 10:22 a.m., noticed the wall clock said it was 10:54. Carruthers’s breathing was labored and much of the color had drained from his dark skin.“How long do you let this go on?” she asked the prison warden. “Until they tell me they can’t,” he said.DeLiberato left the chamber to call Carruthers’s other attorneys and tell them what was happening. When she returned minutes later, the execution was still dragging on. The worst was yet to come.Carruthers, 57, who has always maintained his innocence, was convicted in 1996 for his role in the February 1994 kidnapping and murder of three people: Marcellos Anderson, a drug dealer and friend of Carruthers’s; Anderson’s mother, Delois; and Anderson’s friend, 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. All three were abducted from Delois’s home in Memphis and were discovered a week later, shot and buried together in a local graveyard; they had been bound with cloth, socks, and pantyhose. Prosecutors relied on the allegations of paid informants to charge Carruthers and two brothers, James and Jonathan Montgomery, with murder, alleging that they sought to rob Marcellos and assert dominance in the neighborhood. The prosecutors, seeking the death penalty, would also allege that the victims had been buried alive. Police recovered no forensic evidence linking Carruthers to the crimes.Instead, prosecutors relied on the testimony of Alfredo Shaw, a convict