Tennessee death row inmate challenges execution over possible expired drugs

Tony Carruthers is set to face a Tennessee lethal injection on Thursday, but his lawyers say the state has not answered a basic question: whether the drugs have expired. The dispute has pushed his case beyond the underlying murders and into a broader fight over transparency, chain-of-custody and whether prison officials can prove the chemicals they plan to use are still viable.

Carruthers, 57, was sentenced to death for the 1994 kidnappings and murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson and Frederick Tucker. His attorneys say they asked the Tennessee Department of Correction twice in April whether the execution drugs had expired. Prison officials did not directly answer. Instead, they pointed to the state’s lethal-injection protocol and routine inventory procedures, while declining to say whether the drugs set aside for Carruthers were still usable. Gov. Bill Lee’s office did not immediately respond.

Federal Public Defender Amy Harwell said the expiration date is not a technicality. She warned that an expired drug could lead to "a slow, lingering death" if it no longer produces a reliable loss of consciousness before the body shuts down. That concern lands at the center of modern execution practice, where states increasingly struggle to secure lethal-injection chemicals and where suppliers often operate behind layers of secrecy.

Tennessee has already shown how much hangs on those records. The state resumed executions in 2025 after a pause and used pentobarbital in the May 22, 2025, execution of Oscar Smith, its first in five years. A Knox County judge later ordered Tennessee to disclose expiration dates for the drugs used in the executions of Oscar Smith and Byron Black, along with quality-testing results. Carruthers is one of four Tennessee inmates scheduled for execution in 2026, making his challenge part of a broader docket rather than a single isolated dispute.

The American Civil Liberties Union said Tennessee plans to execute Carruthers despite untested DNA and fingerprint evidence the defense says could support his innocence claim. That argument adds another layer to a case already shaped by procedure: what the state knows about the drugs, when it learned it, and whether it can document a clean chain from storage to injection.

Other states have faced similar breakdowns. South Carolina halted executions for 12 years as it struggled to obtain drugs, then resumed after passing a shield law protecting suppliers, with corrections officials saying they made more than 1,300 contacts while searching. In Idaho, execution drugs were returned as expired in Thomas Creech’s case, and the state later moved its primary execution method to firing squad in part because lethal-injection drugs were so difficult to obtain. Tennessee’s fight over expiration dates shows how capital punishment now turns as much on records, logistics and court-ordered disclosure as on the sentence itself.