Tennessee set to execute first person forced to represent himself at trial in more than a century

Tennessee is scheduled on Thursday to execute a prison inmate whose lawyers claim there was no physical evidence tying him to the crimes he was convicted of and is mentally incompetent. Additionally, the inmate’s lawyers believe that the state may be using expired lethal injection drugs to carry out the sentence. Tony Carruthers, 57, was sentenced to death after being found guilty of the 1994 kidnappings and murders of Marcellos Anderson; his mother, Delois Anderson; and Frederick Tucker, in Memphis. He represented himself at trial, repeatedly complaining about court-appointed attorneys and threatening to harm several of them. He was convicted primarily on the basis of testimony from people who claimed to have heard him confess to or discuss the crimes. Over the days leading up to the scheduled execution, protesters rallied in support of Carruthers and appealed to Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, to call off the execution, scheduled Thursday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The petitions received more than 100,000 signatures, according to the Rev Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. Carruthers and his attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have strong problems with Carruthers’s conviction, including that DNA and fingerprint evidence from the crime scene remain untested. Family members and his attorneys say he has mental illness. Earlier this week, a federal judge denied a request by Carruthers to delay his execution. If the execution goes forward as scheduled, Carruthers will be the first person to be executed after being forced to represent himself in more than a century, according to the clemency petition. Carruthers’s attorneys argued that “paranoia and delusions” prevented their client from being able to cooperate with court-appointed counsel, but the judge in the case viewed this behavior as willful. The Tennessee supreme court later said that Carruthers’s actions before the trial jury were offensive and self-destructive but the situation in which he found himself was one of his own making. In the petition, Carruthers’s attorneys argued that the reason he was sentenced to death was because a medical examiner testified the victims were buried alive, going into excruciating detail for the jury. The examiner later withdrew that claim and subsequent experts have said it was false. Carruthers’s attorneys have also tried to show that he is incompetent to be executed and argued that he believes the government is bluffing about executing him in order to coerce him into accepting a plea deal that exists only in his mind. That way, Carruthers believes, the government can avoid paying him what he thinks are millions of dollars it owes him. He is convinced that his own attorneys are part of a conspiracy against him and refuses to even speak with them, according to court filings. But authorities say that Carruthers was trying to take over the illegal drug trade in his Memphis neighborhood, and Marcellos Anderson was a rival drug dealer. Tennessee began to accelerate executions last year after a three-year pause after the discovery that the state was not properly testing lethal injection drugs for purity and potency. Those same concerns overshadow Carruthers’s execution. His attorneys have twice asked Tennessee’s department of correction if it had secured the appropriate drugs for his execution date and asked for assurance the drugs had not expired. In his response, John Ayers, assistant attorney general, did not directly answer but said the department would comply with its lethal injection protocol. Tennessee has a history of problems with its execution drugs. In 2022, Oscar Smith came within minutes of being executed before Lee issued a reprieve on grounds that that the drugs were not tested. In 2024, Tennessee introduced a new protocol and restarted executions in 2025.