Last month, I walked into Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to watch the State of Tennessee kill my client, Tony Carruthers.
Nothing prepared me to witness the agony that Mr. Carruthers experienced in the execution chamber. Not the nearly 20 years I had spent as a capital defense lawyer. Not the thousands of hours building cases to keep people alive. Not even having stood in a Florida witness room just five months earlier, watching the state kill another one of my clients, Frank Walls, even though he had an intellectual disability.
I first met Mr. Carruthers in March, nearly 30 years to the day that he was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of three people in Memphis. He arrived at our first meeting carrying a stack of legal papers. He shook my hand and immediately started talking about his case.
He wasn’t wearing shackles, and the guards permitted him to walk back and forth to his cell to grab more paperwork. The guards treated him with respect, and he showed them the same. Mr. Carruthers was genuine. I believed him. We got to work.
From the moment I reviewed his case, I recognized the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction: the absence of physical evidence connecting Mr. Carruthers to the crime, forensic evidence that had never been linked to anyone and testimony from a jailhouse snitch who later recanted. I was also shocked to learn that Mr. Carruthers was forced to represent himself at trial after several lawyers asked to be removed from his case, claiming that he was too difficult to work with.
With just two months until Mr. Carruthers’s execution date, we went to court to demand that the state test fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene that do not match Mr. Carruthers’s or the victims’. Despite the signs that Tennessee was preparing to execute a wrongfully convicted man, our efforts were unsuccessful. The state fought us at every turn.
When the morning of the execution arrived, my work changed entirely. I became a witness. My responsibility was to remain present while the state killed my client, and to refuse the comfort of looking away.
My job, as the anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean once told me, was to be a face of love in the room. I carried her words with me into the prison that morning. I knew that if every legal avenue failed, I could still give this to my client. I could remain with him until the end.
I arrived at the prison with full knowledge of Tennessee’s history of procedural failures in its execution chamber. An independent investigation commissioned by Tennessee’s governor found that, between 2018 and 2022, the state repeatedly failed to follow its own protocols while carrying out executions.
The state faced renewed scrutiny last year when prisoners filed a lawsuit challenging its lethal injection protocol. A few months later, the state executed a prisoner without deactivating his heart device, which medical experts warned could cause the device to repeatedly shock him during the lethal injection. Witnesses reported that the prisoner groaned and said, “it’s hurting so bad” during the execution.
Corrections officers met me in the prison’s lobby and walked me to Mr. Carruthers’s cell. Mr. Carruthers was seated on his bunk in his prayer shawl. On the count of three, guards lifted him onto a gurney while his cuffed hands remained in prayer. Then, the guards wheeled Mr. Carruthers into the execution chamber.
Inside, I started furiously taking notes. Tennessee bars journalists from witnessing the intravenous line insertion process, the first major step of the lethal injection protocol. I noted the time we entered the chamber. After about seven minutes of searching for a vein, they were able to insert an IV into his right arm. Then, following protocol, they also tried to set an IV in his left arm. That failed, so they moved on to his left hand, poking him over and over again. Cycling through needles, the executioners communicated mostly through tense glances and head shakes. The used needles were dropped one by one into a small plastic receptacle.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
About 30 minutes in, a doctor entered and began directing increasingly desperate efforts to tap into Mr. Carruthers’s veins. He told the executioners to remove Mr. Carruthers’s socks and search for veins in his feet. They stuck at least one needle into his foot. He winced, clearly in pain. After that didn’t work, the doctor asked whether anyone in the room knew how to gain access to Mr. Carruthers’s jugular vein.
Then, the doctor decided to attempt to establish a central line. This is an invasive procedure that requires puncturing the neck, chest or groin. I immediately objected to the warden. The doctor admitted in a deposition last year that he hadn’t performed one in over a decade and didn’t have privileges to perform one in any hospital in the country. My objection changed nothing.
That moment revealed something deeply unsettling about the machinery of executions in America. The states that still execute people insist that executions are controlled, humane and medically precise. Yet a significant number of executions have gone awry in the past decade, causing agony for prisoners across the country.
When I saw the process unraveling with my own eyes, it became clear that the overriding imperative was not competence or even the appearance of professionalism. It was completion.
The executioners draped Mr. Carruthers in a blue surgical cloth with a hole for his face. The doctor gave him a shot of lidocaine in his chest and told him it would feel like a bee sting. Before the doctor did that, he asked whether “the patient” was allergic to the drug. He referred to Mr. Carruthers as the patient, as though this room existed to heal.
Lethal injection relies on clinical and carefully sanitized language, intended to create emotional distance. The state cloaks killing in the vocabulary of medicine because acknowledging the reality plainly would force us to confront what executions truly are: acts of deliberate violence carried out in the name of justice.
When the doctor prodded Mr. Carruthers’s chest with a scalpel or large needle, Mr. Carruthers cried out in pain. But the doctor continued to push into his chest. Mr. Carruthers started groaning. I told him that his legal team was calling the courts and the governor. I told him that I was sorry. Mostly, I tried to hold his gaze and reassure him that we were still fighting for him.
Eventually, the doctor said he was not able to set a central line. Mr. Carruthers was in agony. By then, an hour had passed. Still, the execution team continued probing his body for another access point.
The room no longer resembled anything clinical or controlled. I could see blood coming out of the puncture wounds. Mr. Carruthers moaned while the executioners moved frantically around him. The state’s constructed illusion of precision had collapsed, revealing something far more chaotic and brutal.
Then, the phone in the execution chamber rang. The warden answered, listened, then hung up and said we weren’t doing this. I almost collapsed right there.
Mr. Carruthers was pale, trembling and drenched in sweat.
About 90 minutes after the execution attempt began, I walked out into the sunlight and spoke to reporters, who had been kept in the dark about what Tennessee had done. This is when I learned that Gov. Bill Lee had just postponed Mr. Carruthers’s execution for at least a year. I called his sister to deliver the news and she wailed with relief.
When I went back to see Mr. Carruthers, he was exhausted and shaken. He could barely keep his balance. He said of the doctor, “He was hurting me and he knew he was hurting me.”
All of the words I could use to describe what I saw and what the State of Tennessee did and failed to do pale in comparison with that simple observation. The state works hard to wrap executions in clinical language, but inside that room, there was no escaping the reality of what was happening.
Maria DeLiberato is senior counsel at the A.C.L.U.’s Capital Punishment Project and a legal consultant for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. She has been a capital defense attorney for nearly 20 years.
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