The horrors of the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers have stayed with me. Our public safety reporter, Brittany Brown, was there and will publish more about her experiences soon. But I also asked Almeer Nance, who has been imprisoned since 1996, for his thoughts:
For more than 30 years, Tony Carruthers has lived under a sentence of death in the Tennessee Department of Corrections. Not a metaphorical death. A literal one. A sentence so close to becoming final that he is only still alive today because the State couldn’t find a vein during the execution attempt.
Think about that for a moment.
The man spent three decades waiting to die, and the only thing that kept him alive was a failed medical procedure.
Since the execution attempt, this case has become one of the biggest conversations moving through the prison grapevine. Not because everybody agrees about guilt or innocence, but because people see the contradiction in it. One co-defendant has been free for over a decade, while Carruthers sat on death row all that time. Same case. Completely different realities.
I understand that feeling personally. In my own case, my co-defendant pled guilty and even testified that I wasn’t the shooter, but it did not change my outcome either. So when people talk about certainty, fairness and equal justice inside the system, I understand firsthand how differently outcomes can unfold between people tied to the same case.
Carruthers’ co-defendant even named someone else in court filings years ago, but it did not change anything. When you see situations like that over and over, you start to wonder how much doubt actually matters once the system has already decided who carries the weight of a case.
Carruthers continues to maintain his innocence while his attorneys and advocates push for additional DNA testing and further review of the evidence. We also should not overlook the fact that three people lost their lives in a horrific crime, and their families have carried that pain for decades. Nothing about this case is simple. But when execution is involved, simplicity is not what justice requires.
Certainty is.
People who have never lived inside a prison often speak about life sentences and death sentences as though they are somehow close to the same thing. They are not.
A life sentence buries a person inside prison. A death sentence buries them and whatever belief they still have in tomorrow. Every appeal, every court date, every delay becomes another reminder that the State is still preparing to kill you. Thirty years under that kind of psychological weight changes a human being, guilty or innocent.
Cases like this eventually become bigger than one man or one conviction. They force us to wrestle with deeper questions about fairness, punishment and what justice is supposed to look like in the first place.
— Almeer Nance
Adrienne Johnson Martin is co-executive director of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Contact her at adrienne.martin@mlk50.com
This story is brought to you byMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.