Tennessee stops the execution after troubling finding a vein
Tennessee jail officials on Thursday tried to put a man to death but failed because they couldn’t find a suitable vein for the lethal injection.
Later, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended Tony Carruthers’ execution for one year. He had been ordered to death after being found guilty of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994.
An Associated Press reporter who was there as a media witness said that after Carruthers was taken to the execution chamber at a maximum-security prison in Nashville, officials tried for more than an hour to set up an IV line before stopping the execution and sending him back to his cell.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement that prison staff were able to set up a main intravenous line but had trouble setting up a “backup line” that is required by the state’s lethal injection protocol.
Lee said in a statement, “I am temporarily releasing Tony Von Carruthers from his sentence of death for one year.”
Reprieve, an abolitionist group, says that Carruthers is at least the seventh man in the U.S. to survive his execution date after a botched fatal injection attempt.
“People say that lethal injection is a gentle and “medical” way to kill someone. “Bloody and prolonged execution attempts like this one show the horrible truth,” Reprieve’s U.S. deputy director, Matt Wells, said in a statement.
