Tennessee set to execute man despite botched attempt on another prisoner

Published 12 August 2026 · politics

Tennessee is scheduled to execute a man this week despite bipartisan backlash after the state botched its previous lethal injection, which dragged on for more

Tennessee is scheduled to execute a man this week despite bipartisan backlash after the state botched its previous lethal injection, which dragged on for more than an hour before it was canceled. Darrell Hines, who was convicted of the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins, a motel maid and mother of four, is due to be put to death on Thursday. Hines’s lawyers have asked the US supreme court to intervene, arguing that he could face a fate similar to Tony Carruthers, who endured a prolonged, failed execution in May. Hines is one of three people slated to be executed on Thursday across the US as a handful of states continue to aggressively pursue capital punishment. Hines has maintained his innocence. Jenkins’ family has called on the execution to proceed. Death row inmate Darrell Hines in Tennessee. Photograph: Tennessee Department of Correction/AP Tennessee’s execution procedures are shrouded in secrecy. It is unclear how the state acquires, maintains and administers its lethal injection drugs, and attorneys have long warned the lack of oversight could result in protracted, agonizing killings and botched procedures. On 21 May, during the failed execution of Carruthers, an IV team and a physician spent roughly an hour and 15 minutes struggling to establish an IV line to inject Carruthers with the lethal drugs, Maria DeLiberato, Carruthers’ attorney, said in a court declaration. The IV team pierced Carruthers all over his body more than a dozen times, causing him to groan in pain, said DeLiberato, senior counsel with the ACLU’s capital punishment project.

In a declaration, DeLiberato recalled her client being strapped to an execution gurney as the doctor and others on the IV team tried and failed to locate veins in his arms, hands, feet and shoulder, and then could not establish a central line in his jugular. A warden eventually paused the execution, and Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve. When DeLiberato was able to see her client after the botched execution, she said he was “sweaty, pale, tearful, and he seemed to be in shock and pain”. Hines is 66 years old, very thin, has suffered significant muscular atrophy after recent strokes and has stiffness in his arm that causes his hand to remain clenched in a fist – all factors that would make it challenging to establish an IV line, according to medical declarations filed by his lawyers. Kit Thomas, one of Hines’s attorneys, noted her client was generally bed-bound or in a wheelchair: “It’s grotesque. It’s particularly horrifying to think of them lifting a partially paralyzed man from his hospital bed, which he’s lived in for the last eight months, then strapping him to a gurney, while executioners attempt to establish IV access.” The names of officials carrying out executions are kept secret by state law, but the identity of a physician involved in Carruthers’ execution became public when a warden inadvertently disclosed it following another prisoner’s execution last year. That physician, Dr Mark Fowler, was subsequently deposed by death row attorneys.