On May 21, Tony Carruthers was set to be executed at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. Despite the questionable reliability of his conviction, the state tried to kill him by lethal injection, and it went terribly wrong.
Carruthers suffered for more than an hour as prison staff poked needles into his arm, hand, and foot until they were bloody. And after all that torture, they failed to establish an IV line to deliver the lethal cocktail.
After the execution was aborted, the governor ordered the state to wait a year before trying again. But that’s not justice.
Carruthers is the ninth person in 80 years to survive an attempt at execution. A study of all lethal injection executions in the U.S. since 1982 shows that half of all failed lethal injections were of Black people. It’s hard to ignore the comparison historians draw between lynchings and executions.
The death penalty is an outdated, racist, and barbaric practice. More than 140 countries around the world have abolished it. It’s time for the U.S. to do the same.