NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Tennessee from executing death row inmate Tony Carruthers, arguing that untested DNA and fingerprint evidence could exonerate him.
Carruthers is scheduled to be executed Thursday, May 21. In a release issued Wednesday, the organizations said Tennessee is “sitting on unidentified DNA and fingerprint evidence” that does not match Carruthers and has not been compared to an alternative suspect identified years after the killings.
“We are only hours away from the state of Tennessee executing a potentially innocent man while they are sitting on evidence that could prove who really committed this crime,” Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said in a statement.
The filing asks the nation’s highest court to reverse the Tennessee Supreme Court’s denial of additional forensic testing.
According to the ACLU, Carruthers’ legal team filed a motion April 9 seeking DNA testing that they argued could prove he was wrongfully convicted. The group said the Tennessee Supreme Court later ruled the request had been filed in the wrong court before the matter eventually returned to the state high court days before the scheduled execution.
“There is no justice in rushing Tony Carruthers to the execution chamber without first testing evidence that could prove his innocence,” Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, legal director of the ACLU of Tennessee, said in the release.
Gov. Bill Lee announced Tuesday he would not intervene to stop the execution after reviewing Carruthers’ clemency request.
Carruthers was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1994 killings of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker. His attorneys and supporters have argued the case relied heavily on jailhouse informants and circumstantial evidence.
The push to halt the execution comes as Carruthers’ legal team has also raised concerns about Tennessee’s lethal injection process. Attorneys recently questioned whether the state planned to use expired execution drugs, citing Tennessee’s past issues with testing and handling lethal injection chemicals.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Tennessee officials declined to answer questions about whether the drugs intended for Carruthers’ execution had expired. Tennessee previously paused executions in 2022 after Gov. Lee granted a last-minute reprieve in another case due to problems with the state’s lethal injection testing procedures.
The ACLU said more than 130,000 people signed a petition asking Lee to stop the execution.
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