I’m not going to be executed. I’m a busy roach and I’m smiling. I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated.
Those were the defiant words spoken by a death row inmate scheduled to die by execution earlier today. Tony Carruthers is still alive tonight after a dramatic turn of events in Nashville. It took doctors administering the lethal injection over an hour to find a vein, but they never did.
So the execution was cancelled and put off, leaving a man still alive this evening despite being scheduled for execution this morning. It was a dramatic turn today with a lot happening in the case of the Memphis death row inmate. Just hours after the United States Supreme Court declined to stop his execution, Governor Bill Lee granted him a one-year reprieve.
It is 9:45 in the morning when seven media witnesses walk into a death chamber in Nashville, Tennessee. They take their seats and they wait in the dark room, separated from the chamber by a closed curtain. Outside the walls of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, protesters have gathered in the early morning cold.
One woman, Cararissa Schultz, is standing right at the fence. A reporter approaches her and asks why she came out to the prison facility. She says she had to explain this morning to her eight-year-old daughter what was about to happen inside that building.
She mentions that even her young daughter knew it was wrong. Inside the facility, a man named Tony Carruthers is strapped securely to a gurney. The state of Tennessee has a strict 10:00 a.m. appointment to end his life.
The night before, his attorneys had gone directly to the United States Supreme Court with an emergency request to stop the execution. They argued that a man who may be innocent was about to die. They argued that critical DNA evidence had never been tested and that the real perpetrator had already been named.
The Supreme Court denied the request that same morning, clearing the execution to proceed. And then, something went wrong. Medical staff managed to find a primary vein in his right arm, which was standard procedure.
They then moved to establish the backup line required by state protocol before the lethal drug pentobarbital could be administered. They searched his left arm six or seven times, then moved to his left hand, his left foot, and his jugular vein. They even attempted a central line in his upper chest, but the doctor on site was not qualified to place it.
They tried his right shoulder as ninety minutes passed by. His attorney, Maria DeLiberato, was in that room and watched every single attempt. She later told reporters he was wincing and groaning, and that by the end, he was in absolute agony.
After an hour and a half, the state of Tennessee finally gave up. Governor Bill Lee issued a temporary one-year reprieve. Tony Carruthers was unstrapped from the gurney and returned to his cell.
He is still alive, but only just, and only for now. Because here is what has not changed through all of this drama. The DNA from the crime scene is still sitting in a lab in Memphis, completely untested, uncompared, and ignored.
Six fingerprints lifted from the murder scene have never been matched to anyone. The victim’s fingernails have never been swabbed or analyzed. And the man that Carruthers’ own co-defendant identified as the actual killer has been dead since 2002.
His name was Ronnie Irving, and Tennessee never once compared his DNA to the evidence buried in that grave. Tony Carruthers has been on death row for thirty years. He was convicted on the testimony of a single paid informant who recanted on live television before the trial even began.
He represented himself in court because a judge stripped him of his right to counsel as a form of punishment. And the state spent $625,000 preparing to execute him while refusing to run a single DNA test. They have avoided the question for three decades.
Is the right man on death row? Welcome to today’s case, the Tony Carruthers execution and the DNA evidence the state of Tennessee refuses to test. If this is your first time here, hit subscribe right now and turn on notifications.
We cover every angle of cases like this as they develop, and this one is far from over. Drop a comment and tell us where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s go back to Memphis, February 1994.
To understand what happened in that death chamber this morning, you need to understand what happened in a South Memphis cemetery thirty-two years ago. It is the evening of February 24, 1994, in South Memphis. A woman named Leventhiya comes home to her aunt Delois Anderson’s house.
The car is parked in the driveway, and her purse is sitting right on the counter. The keys are where they always are. In the bedroom, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter sit in their usual spot.
A plate of greens has been served and left out. It looks like Delois stepped out for just a moment. But she never came back.
Delois Anderson was forty-three years old. Her son Marcellos, whom everyone called Cello, was twenty-one. He dealt drugs in South Memphis, wore expensive jewelry, and was known to carry large amounts of cash.
That night, he had a friend with him named Frederick Tucker. Frederick was seventeen years old and had no involvement in the streets whatsoever. He was just there.
By midnight, all three of them were completely gone. At 2:40 the following morning, a sheriff’s deputy in Mississippi responded to a burning vehicle just south of the Tennessee state line. It was a white Jeep Cherokee with gold trim that traced back to Marcellos Anderson.
No jewelry was recovered from the vehicle, and no cash was found. Everything he was known to carry had vanished. On March 3, 1994, a week after a missing person’s report was filed, Jonathan Montgomery made a move.
Jonathan, who was James Montgomery’s brother, led Detective Jack Ruby of the Memphis Police Department to Rose Hill Cemetery. The cemetery was located on Elvis Presley Boulevard in South Memphis. He took them specifically to the fresh grave of a woman named Dorothy Daniels, who had been buried the morning of February 25.
A court order was quickly obtained, and the casket was lifted. Underneath it, beneath a piece of plywood and several inches of packed dirt, were all three bodies. Their hands were bound behind their backs.
A red sock was wrapped tightly around Delois Anderson’s neck. The two men had been shot. At trial, medical examiner Dr. O.C. Smith testified in explicit detail.
He stated that all three victims had been buried alive. He claimed that dirt had been found in Delois Anderson’s nose and mouth. He testified that Marcellos had been paralyzed but was still breathing when placed in that pit.
Prosecutor Bobby Carter told the jury:
“If these murders don’t qualify for the death penalty, then none ever will.”
That specific testimony drove the death sentence.
In 2007, Dr. O.C. Smith’s career collapsed after a bizarre scandal. He was found in a county morgue stairwell with barbed wire around his head and a bomb around his neck, which ended in a federal mistrial. Following this, he filed a sworn affidavit withdrawing his buried-alive conclusion entirely.
He said he could no longer stand by that medical opinion. A second pathologist, Dr. Harry Blake, had reviewed the same evidence before the original trial at the judge’s request. He had concluded the victims were not buried alive.
A third expert, Dr. George Nichols, later reached the exact same conclusion. Not one of them found evidence supporting the buried-alive theory. At least one juror later signed a declaration stating directly that had they known the victims were not buried alive, they would not have voted for the death sentence.
The most damning detail of the entire case, the detail that sent Tony Carruthers to death row, was completely false. And the man responsible for calling Dr. Blake to testify at trial to give the jury that information before they voted to kill someone was Tony Carruthers himself. He was representing himself with no legal training, no courtroom experience, and as his attorneys would spend decades arguing, no capacity at that moment to understand what that decision would cost him.
Police had two suspects in custody almost immediately. What they did not have, not a single piece of it, was physical evidence. There was no forensic link, no weapon, no DNA, and nothing placing Tony Carruthers at Rose Hill Cemetery the night of February 24, 1994.
What they had was a witness. And what that witness did next is where this case starts to rot. Jonathan Montgomery led Detective Jack Ruby to that grave on March 3, 1994, and then pointed the finger at his brother James and at Tony Carruthers.
He was indicted alongside both men. Then, before a single day of trial could begin, Jonathan Montgomery was found hanged in his cell. The man who knew exactly where those bodies were buried, the man prosecutors needed most, was gone.
Without him, the case completely fell apart. A judge reviewed what remained of the evidence and threw out the first-degree murder charges. There was no physical evidence connecting either Carruthers or James Montgomery to the cemetery, to the victims, or to the crime itself.
An assistant district attorney would later testify about the situation. He stated that prosecutors responded by instructing police to get out and beat the bushes for witnesses. What they found was Alfredo Shaw.
Shaw was twenty-eight years old and a fixture at 201 Poplar, the Shelby County Jail in downtown Memphis. A longtime jail employee who had known Shaw since the 1980s described him as someone who cycled in and out of that facility for years. He was cocky on the surface, but with deep fear behind his eyes.
On March 27, 1994, Shaw sat down with Memphis Police Department sergeants and gave a recorded statement. He claimed Tony Carruthers had confessed the entire murder to him. He detailed the jeep, the drive to Mississippi, the shooting, the burning car, and Delois Anderson screaming as they pushed her into the grave.
Two days later, on March 29, 1994, indictments against Carruthers and James Montgomery were returned. Shaw repeated the story to a grand jury shortly after. There was still no physical evidence, no weapon, and no forensic connection.
The entire prosecution now rested on one man’s word. According to court documents filed in 2011, Shaw later swore to a different reality. He stated that before he gave that statement on March 27, Assistant District Attorney Jerry Harris and MPD officers Wilkinson and Rollson had already briefed him on the case.
They showed him the file and fed him the details. Shaw said he had no independent knowledge of the murders. Everything he told police and the grand jury came directly from law enforcement.
He had not spoken to Tony Carruthers about the February 1994 case at all. In February 1996, weeks before the trial, Shaw went even further. He contacted Memphis Channel 13, sat down with his identity concealed, and on the record on television, recanted everything.
He described being approached by Jerry Harris and offered money. Shaw later said in different accounts the figure was either $1,000 or $3,000 along with the dismissal of pending criminal charges against him in exchange for his testimony. He said Harris and officers Wilkinson and Rollson had coached him with bits and pieces of the case and instructed him on what to say to the grand jury.
The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office responded by calling Shaw a liar. Harris told the station Shaw was not credible and that the office would not be calling him as a trial witness. But the retaliation did not stop there.
According to documents filed in the same 2011 federal court proceedings, immediately after the Channel 13 interview aired, Harris, Wilkinson, and Rollson visited Shaw and threatened him directly. They told him that if he repeated his recantation, if he kept saying his testimony was false, they would come after him. Shaw was later asked by a defense investigator why he went back to the original story on the witness stand at trial.
His answer was documented and entered into the record:
“I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the district attorney’s office would retaliate against me.”
And there is one more layer to this that the Shelby County District Attorney’s office successfully concealed for thirty years.
Shaw was not just a one-time paid witness. Court documents describe him as a career informant. His file, which the Memphis Police Department did not hand over to Carruthers’ defense team until August 2024 after a reform-minded prosecutor took office, documented paid drug buys Shaw conducted on behalf of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department continuously from 1991 through 1997.
He was on the government payroll before Carruthers was arrested, during the grand jury, through the trial, and beyond. Every time defense attorneys formally asked the District Attorney’s office whether Shaw was a paid informant, the answer was no. By the time this case reached a courtroom in April 1996, the only witness who could place Tony Carruthers at that crime had already recanted on live television.
There was no physical evidence. The third co-defendant was dead in a jail cell. What happened at trial should not have been legally possible.
Voir dire began on April 15, 1996, in Shelby County Criminal Court in Memphis. The trial started April 18. It was over by April 26.
Eleven days, three murder charges, and a man with no legal training standing completely alone at the defense table. Before a single juror was seated, Carruthers had already been through six court-appointed defense attorneys. Every one of them eventually asked Judge Joseph B. Dailey to be removed, describing their client as erratic, abusive, and impossible to work with.
Dailey grew completely tired of it. He became convinced, as he later stated on the record, that Carruthers’ behavior was part of an overall ploy to delay the case forever until something happened that prevented it from being tried. So, after attorney number six was removed, Dailey refused to appoint a seventh.
He ordered Carruthers to represent himself, describing the decision in part as a sanction for Carruthers’ misconduct. What happened next is documented in court transcripts. Carruthers’ most recent attorney, Bill Massie, realized what was unfolding and approached the bench.
His words to Judge Dailey are in the record:
“Judge, a compromised Bill Massie is better than Tony Carruthers representing himself. He wants me back aboard. I’ll come.”
Dailey refused.
Carruthers himself pleaded for new counsel, any counsel, on January 11, February 20, March 4, and again on April 15, 1996. Every request was denied. What the judge declined to fully reckon with is what Carruthers’ attorneys have spent three decades putting into the record.
Relatives across generations of Carruthers’ family had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. When he was fourteen, his mother, Jane Carruthers, had him admitted to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He had been in and out of detention since that age, cycling through institutions while his illness went unnamed and untreated.
By the time he stood in that courtroom in April 1996, defense experts would later conclude he had a form of schizoaffective disorder with symptoms including pervasive delusions and paranoia. He was, in their words, mentally ill, irrational, and incompetent to stand trial at the time of his arrest. The delusions about his attorneys were specific and documented.
He believed one lawyer was neglecting his case to initiate a sexual relationship with him. He believed another harbored a secret cocaine addiction. He believed all of them, without exception, were conspiring with the prosecution to destroy him.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bushan Agharkar, who evaluated Carruthers in 2011, wrote in a court filing:
“Mr. Carruthers exists in a delusional world that appears normal to him. It is akin to asking a fish what water is.”
None of that was adequately before the court when Dailey made his ruling.
Instead, the jury watched a mentally ill man with no legal training defend himself against three murder charges in a capital case. The critical moment came when Carruthers called Alfredo Shaw to the stand. Shaw had already recanted publicly on Channel 13.
The prosecution had decided not to call him, knowing he was a liability. Carruthers, convinced he could expose Shaw as a liar and get the entire case thrown out, called Shaw himself. Before Shaw testified, Judge Dailey warned him directly in open court.
He told him that if he repeated his recanted statements, he would face perjury charges. Shaw reverted completely to his original story. He told the jury he had contacted homicide detectives through a Crime Stoppers hotline after hearing about the murders on the news.
When Carruthers tried to confront him with prior inconsistent statements, the effort collapsed completely. Shaw told the jury he had only wavered because he feared for his life. Carruthers’ appellate attorneys later described the entire cross-examination as singularly inept, ineffective, and disastrous.
They stated it was one that appeared designed to secure not only a guilty verdict but a death sentence. Carruthers also attempted to question Shaw about being a paid informant. Judge Dailey blocked the question entirely.
The jury never heard it. Six fingerprints recovered from the crime scene excluded both Carruthers and Montgomery. The jury never heard about those either.
A mentally ill man with no legal training simply did not know how to introduce them into evidence. On April 26, 1996, the verdict came back. He was found guilty on three counts of first-degree murder.
He was found guilty on three counts of especially aggravated kidnapping. He was found guilty on one count of especially aggravated robbery. Three death sentences were handed down.
In his closing argument, prosecutor Bobby Carter told the jury:
“If these murders don’t qualify for the death penalty, then none ever will.”
The buried-alive testimony from Dr. O.C. Smith had driven that argument.
The claim was that the murders were especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel because the victims suffocated underground. Two jurors later signed declarations stating the buried-alive testimony was the primary factor in their decision to vote for death. One wrote:
“Had I known that the victims were not buried alive, I would have not voted for a death sentence.”
That testimony has since been fully retracted, and the forensic science does not support it.
But those votes were cast, and they counted, and Tony Carruthers went straight to death row. James Montgomery, who had a lawyer, was granted a new trial in 2000 after an appeals court found he had been severely prejudiced by Carruthers’ conduct at trial. Prosecutors offered him a plea to three counts of second-degree murder.
He was released from prison in 2015. Carruthers stayed on death row. While Montgomery was building a new life, Carruthers was fighting to prove something.
The DNA evidence had already suggested that neither of them should have been convicted at all. Tony Carruthers has maintained his innocence for thirty years. And the physical evidence, every time it has been properly examined, has pointed somewhere else entirely.
Start with what was buried in that grave at Rose Hill Cemetery alongside the three victims. Investigators recovered a white blanket-like cloth with blood on it. When DNA testing was finally conducted during James Montgomery’s retrial, scientists found a robust unidentified male DNA profile on that blanket.
It was not a partial sample or a fragment too degraded to read. It was a full, clean male profile. It did not match Tony Carruthers, it did not match James Montgomery, and it did not match any of the three victims.
Investigators uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. In 2019, Carruthers’ attorneys received confirmation that there were no hits. That profile, sitting on a bloodstained blanket found with three murder victims in a Memphis cemetery grave, has never been matched to anyone.
Five latent fingerprints were also recovered from Delois Anderson’s home, the house where three people were taken at gunpoint on the night of February 24, 1994. Every one of them excluded both Tony Carruthers and James Montgomery. Not one has ever been matched to anyone.
Then there are the victims’ fingernails. Federal court documents filed by Carruthers’ attorneys include testimony from forensic expert Mr. Keel. He stated plainly that fingernails have long been recognized as likely bearing assailant biology in cases involving violent physical contact.
He noted that with modern technology, they are now routinely tested. The fingernails of Marcellos Anderson, Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker have never been tested. Not in 1994, not during Montgomery’s retrial, and not in 2026, in the weeks before Tennessee tried to execute the man convicted of their murders.
Now consider who none of this evidence has ever been compared to. His name was Ronnie Irving. On the streets of South Memphis, people called him Eyeball.
In 2010, James Montgomery, while still serving out his remaining sentence, gave a formal statement to an investigator from the capital habeas unit. Montgomery said he had kidnapped Marcellos Anderson and Frederick Tucker himself. He said he had dispatched Ronnie Irving to separately kidnap Delois Anderson.
He stated explicitly on the record:
“Tony Carruthers was not involved in the kidnapping or the murders.”
Ronnie Irving was murdered in 2002, but his fingerprints and a DNA sample remain on file at the Shelby County Medical Examiner’s Office in Memphis.
The unidentified male profile from the white blanket has never been compared to Ronnie Irving. The five unmatched fingerprints have never been compared to Ronnie Irving. The victims’ fingernails have never been tested against anyone.
The state of Tennessee’s answer to every motion for DNA testing was denial, not on the merits, but on procedural grounds. In April 2026, after the ACLU filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court requesting comparison of the DNA profile to Irving, the court responded with a ruling. The court acknowledged the profile had never been compared to Irving.
Then it concluded that even if DNA testing excluded Carruthers, it would not in any way provide a reasonable probability that he would not have been convicted. That reasoning is worth sitting with for a moment. A court looked at unidentified male DNA on a bloodstained blanket found with three murder victims, acknowledged it had never been compared to the named alternative suspect identified by the co-defendant himself, and decided it was not worth finding out.
Tennessee spent $625,000 on execution-related supplies in the leadup to May 21, 2026, and refused to fund a single DNA comparison. The competency fight ran parallel to all of it. Carruthers’ attorneys at the federal public defender’s office argued he was legally incompetent to be executed.
They argued that he could not rationally understand his own situation. Court filings described a man who believed the government was bluffing about the execution to coerce him into accepting a plea deal that existed only in his mind. He believed the government owed him millions of dollars and that his own attorneys were working against him.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bushan Agharkar, who evaluated Carruthers in 2011, wrote that Carruthers existed in a delusional world that appeared completely normal to him, describing it as akin to asking a fish what water is. Senior Judge Mark Ward held a hearing in March 2026 and denied the competency motion. On May 18, 2026, faith leaders, civil rights advocates, and Dr. Tanya Carruthers Hervey, Tony’s sister, marched to the Tennessee state capital.
Hervey had driven from Memphis that morning. She told reporters she felt like she was living in a parallel universe. She remembered her brother as a boy who spent summers cutting lawns, then brought his earnings home and walked his three siblings to the Kroger to buy chips and candy bars.
Standing outside the governor’s office alongside a formerly exonerated death row inmate, she personally delivered a petition with over 130,000 signatures calling for DNA testing before the execution proceeded. Kim Kardashian posted to her 345 million Instagram followers, urging them to call Governor Lee’s office directly. Demetrius Minor, executive director of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, publicly called for a halt at the capital steps.
One advocate told the crowd:
“If the system can execute an innocent man, the blood will be on the hands of everyone who stayed silent.”
On May 19, Governor Bill Lee issued his response.
“After deliberate consideration of Tony von Carruthers’ request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”
The ACLU filed two emergency applications, one to the state and one directly to the United States Supreme Court. On the morning of May 21, the Supreme Court denied the stay.
The execution was cleared to proceed. What happened inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution that morning is something Tennessee did not anticipate. The execution was set for 10:00 a.m. on May 21, 2026, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
Seven media witnesses entered the viewing room at 9:45 a.m. The curtain between them and the execution chamber was closed, and it never opened for the entirety of what followed. They sat in a dark room and heard what was happening rather than seeing it.
Through a crack beneath a door connecting the two rooms, they could hear distinct voices. At one point, an unidentified man could be heard asking Carruthers to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten. Shortly after, groaning could be heard.
Maria DeLiberato was inside that chamber and documented everything. Medical staff established a primary IV line in Carruthers’ right arm at 10:41 a.m. Then came the backup line required by state protocol.
They tried his left arm six to seven times, his left hand, his left foot, and his jugular. They called in a doctor to attempt a central line in his upper chest. The local anesthetic lidocaine had not fully taken effect when the needle went in.
DeLiberato said the doctor’s hands were shaking. She counted two or three puncture wounds, and there was a lot of blood. A man she identified as a member of the state attorney general’s staff spoke to the medical professional.
“Do your job, sir.”
At 11:22 a.m., the doctor said he could not place the central line. They made one final attempt in Carruthers’ right shoulder.
At 11:40 a.m., the warden received a phone call inside the chamber and announced it was over. One hour and eighteen minutes had passed, and every single attempt had failed. Outside, DeLiberato sat with reporters.
“This was a tortured, botched execution. By the grace of God, he’s still alive, but they tortured him trying to find a vein.”
Casey Stubs of the ACLU called the entire process barbaric. Nashville Banner reporter Steven Hale, who had been in the witness room, shared his thoughts with his outlet.
“If we’re going to have a death penalty in this state, we should all have to confront what that looks like.”
DeLiberato was mid-sentence with reporters when the news arrived. Governor Bill Lee had issued a one-year reprieve.
She started crying immediately.
“That’s amazing. I’m so grateful.”
Two additional details from the public record confirm the chaos. The last-minute emergency stay application to the United States Supreme Court was personally denied by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
And in the days prior to the execution, Tennessee prison officials had refused to confirm to Carruthers’ attorneys whether the pentobarbital they planned to use was expired. No such assurance was ever given to the legal team. Tony Carruthers is fifty-seven years old.
He is back in his cell at Riverbend. The reprieve runs out in May 2027. The DNA on that white blanket is still uncompared to Ronnie Irving.
The five unmatched fingerprints are still unmatched. The victims’ fingernails have never been tested. Three more Tennessee executions are scheduled before the end of 2026.
Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines, Gary Wayne Sutton, and Christa Pike, who would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in over two hundred years. For every five executions Tennessee has carried out, there has been one exoneration. The state had the DNA, they had the fingerprints, and they had a named suspect.
Both the informant and the co-defendant said Carruthers was not there. Tennessee spent $625,000 preparing to execute him and would not spend a dollar to find out if they had the right man. The DNA is still sitting there.
May 2027 is coming. If that question is keeping you up at night the same way it is keeping us up, subscribe right now and turn on notifications. We will be here when May 2027 arrives.
We will be covering the DNA fight, every legal development, and the Christa Pike execution. Drop in the comments, should Tennessee be legally required to test that DNA before they reschedule this execution? Tell us where you are watching from. We read every single one.
