When the Tennessee Department of Corrections botched Tony Carruthers’ execution, it wasn’t surprising to Austin Sarat. He’s been researching and writing about “state killings” for decades.
“Of all of the methods of execution used in the United States over the last 140 years, lethal injection has the highest rate of being botched,” said Sarat, a professor of law and politics at Amherst College. He said an execution is botched when it deviates from standard operating procedure or official legal protocol.
Across the United States, more than 270 people’s executions did not go as planned, data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center shows. Some 8,776 executions were conducted in the United States between 1890 and 2010. Research shows lethal injection is more likely to cause problems despite being described as effective and humane.
In Carruthers’ case, his execution attempt was not only botched, but it was “a complete failure,” Sarat said.
The state of Tennessee tried to give a lethal injection to Carruthers, a Memphis man on death row, but the procedure was canceled after executioners failed to find a suitable vein for a backup IV line. Republican Gov. Bill Lee granted a one-year reprieve, so the state cannot attempt to execute him again until next year. Carruthers’ family and attorneys said he’s been experiencing physical and mental health issues after the failed lethal injection attempt in May.
“The state has an obligation to get it right,” Sarat said. “What could be more cruel than having to prepare to die, then having to go through it again?”
Carruthers is the ninth person to survive an execution since the mid-1900s, Sarat said. Eight people survived failed lethal injections, and one person survived a failed electrocution.
“In many botched executions, the condemned end up dead,” he said. “(Carruthers) is in a very rare class of individuals who go into the execution chamber and live to tell about it. Those people cause enormous problems to the legal system.”
Now, capital defense attorneys and Republican lawmakers are requesting the governor review execution standards and publicize more information about the process. Until these issues are resolved, they are requesting the state pause this year’s scheduled executions: Darrell Hines in August, Christa Pike in September and Gary Sutton in December.
Hines’ attorneys said he is in constant pain and “has major neurological and cognitive impairments” after surviving a series of strokes which left him with no use of his left eye, arm, hand or leg, his attorneys wrote in a letter sent to the governor’s office on June 22.
“The prospect of executing such a profoundly disabled individual is horrifying. TDOC’s recent failed attempt to execute Mr. Carruthers demonstrates that it remains incapable of effectively performing executions by lethal injection, even in the absence of such additional medical complications,” the letter reads.
As of June 30, there has been no response from Lee, Hines’ attorneys told MLK50.
Protocol and power
For decades, various execution methods have been used across the country: hanging, firing squad, electrocution, cyanide gas, nitrogen gas and lethal injection. “States, for a long time, have struggled with how they’re going to carry out state-warranted executions,” said Frank Romanelli. He is a pharmacy professor and researcher at the University of Kentucky.
In Tennessee, the state hanged people until the 1910s, when the noose was phased out and replaced by the electric chair. Electrocution was the sole execution method until the state added lethal injection as an option in the 1990s. That’s when electrocution became a secondary method, but it can still be chosen by people on death row “who committed their crimes prior to January 1, 1999,” according to TDOC’s website.
Lethal injection has been the primary way people have been put to death in Tennessee for nearly three decades. “Using drugs became an option, and the history of that is kind of checkered. What drugs do you use and what combinations?” Romanelli said.
TDOC’s newest lethal injection protocol — publicized in 2025 after being revised for the sixth time since its implementation in the 1990s — shows the state uses a five-gram dose of pentobarbital. It is a type of barbiturate medication that can be used to treat insomnia and seizures. The drug can lower heart rate and decrease blood pressure, which can cause a person to stop breathing.
In previous years, Tennessee, like many other states, used a “three-drug protocol:” Midazolam, a benzodiazepine that causes sleepiness; vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used to cause paralysis; and potassium chloride, which induces cardiac arrest.
In 2022, Butler Snow, an international law firm with offices in Memphis and Nashville, investigated the state’s former execution protocol. The report found the “absence of adequate expertise, guidance, and counsel … with Tennessee’s lethal injection process.” TDOC officials told investigators they “prefer a one-drug protocol” since “there is a lower risk of mistake in carrying out an execution.”
“We study drugs, and we approve drugs based on efficacy and safety — meaning is the drug going to do what we intended to do,” Romanelli said. “The intended use of lethal injection is to kill someone … We don’t necessarily know the exact doses. We can do some predicting, but they were never studied for that exact purpose.”
Last spring, attorneys representing Hines and others on death row filed a lawsuit alleging the state’s revised, single-drug lethal injection protocol “violates the United States and Tennessee Constitutions.”
In March 2025, attorneys told the court TDOC had “developed an internal culture of recklessness, and the lethal injection protocol could “pose a high risk of a torturous death.” As of June, the lawsuit is still being litigated in Davidson County Chancery Court. Other reporting shows TDOC may have reduced training for people who place IV lines during lethal injections.
Another issue with the state’s execution protocol is secrecy. Basic information about how the lethal injection is administered is public. However, TDOC does not reveal how it obtains and stores the drugs, and the agency does not name involved medical personnel.
GOP senators in the Tennessee State Legislature sent a letter to the governor on June 25 asking him to order an independent review of the personnel and the drugs involved in “the failed execution of May 21.”
“Correct every deficiency that review identifies,” the letter reads, “before the State attempts another execution. Make those testing results and personnel qualifications available … to the public.”
Transparency “would improve the protocols” due to “more peer review” and experts providing feedback on how the process should operate, Romanelli said. “As a voter, if I was someone being asked to evaluate lethal injection, how can I evaluate it? How can I say support it or I don’t support it when I really don’t know much about it,” Romanelli said.
On July 1, Tennessee State Rep. Jody Barrett sent a letter to TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada stating the public’s expectation that the department conduct executions “humanely, competently, professionally, and in accordance with established procedures.”
“The failed execution of Tony Carruthers left many Tennesseans wondering whether (TDOC) is capable of fulfilling that responsibility,” the letter reads.
Sarat agreed the state — not Carruthers — is to blame for the failed lethal injection. He questioned why Tennessee is adamant to execute people who may be intellectually disabled, who lacked high-quality defense representation, who were forced to represent themselves at trial and who may be found innocent due to untested DNA evidence.
“Wouldn’t it be great if Tennessee set an example?” Sarat said. “Would I bet my retirement money on that? No.”
Brittany Brown is the public safety reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at brittany.brown@mlk50.com
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