Pending challenges from his legal team over the potency of the state's lethal injection supply and failed court bids to obtain DNA and fingerprint testing or a finding of mental incompetence, Tony Carruthers faces execution in Tennessee, according to NBC News.
Carruthers, 57, was sentenced to death for the 1994 kidnappings and murders of Marcellos Anderson, Anderson's mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker in Memphis. Prosecutors brought no physical evidence linking Carruthers to the killings; instead, the conviction rested on accounts from witnesses who said they heard him either admit to the crimes or talk about them, according to NBC News. Among those witnesses was a man later identified as a paid police informant.
After a pattern of complaints against court-appointed counsel and threats of violence directed at several of them, Carruthers was compelled to serve as his own attorney. Defense attorneys contend that deep-seated "paranoia and delusions" made meaningful cooperation with appointed counsel impossible, a characterization the trial judge rejected, viewing the conduct as a deliberate choice. A clemency petition submitted to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, cited by NBC News, states that should the execution go ahead, no one in over a hundred years will have been put to death after being made to stand trial without counsel.
Central to the clemency petition is the argument that a medical examiner's graphic testimony claiming the victims were buried alive drove the jury to impose death — testimony that the examiner later recanted and that other forensic experts have since discredited, according to NBC News.
Carruthers' legal team has also sought to establish that he is mentally incompetent to be executed. According to court filings, Carruthers holds that the execution threat is a government ruse designed to push him toward a fictional plea deal, and that his own lawyers are working against him as part of a broader conspiracy.
The execution date was set by the Tennessee Supreme Court alongside three others, including Christa Pike, the only woman on the state's death row, according to The Associated Press. A three-year halt to executions — prompted by revelations that the state had failed to properly verify the purity and potency of its lethal injection drugs — ended when Tennessee carried out a new round of executions last year. A subsequent independent investigation determined that lethal injection drugs had gone without complete testing across all seven executions carried out in the state since 2018, while the attorney general's office acknowledged in court filings that two key figures responsible for the drug supply had given false sworn testimony about whether the required testing was taking place.