Tennessee Supreme Court Orders Execution of Tony Carruthers After 1994 Murders

Tony Carruthers is scheduled to be executed Thursday, with Tennessee’s Supreme Court ordering the state execution and setting the date for May 21, 2026, and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee saying he will not stop it.

In a statement Tuesday, Lee said: "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."

Memphis Flyer

The case centers on 1994 first-degree murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Taylor, who were buried alive beneath a casket in a Memphis cemetery, according to court documents described by the Memphis Flyer.

The Intercept reports that prosecutors arrested 25-year-old Tony Carruthers after he had recently gotten out of prison, and that a jury sentenced him to die in 1996.

Supporters and attorneys are seeking to halt the execution, with WSMV reporting that more than 50,000 people signed a petition to stop it and that Carruthers’s attorneys filed a complaint for relief citing a conviction "based entirely on circumstantial evidence, including testimony from a secretly paid informant, several convicted felons, and the medical examiner’s false and discredited testimony."

WSMV says the petition to halt Carruthers’s execution will be delivered to Gov. Lee’s office on Monday, and that Tim Hughes, the president of the NAACP Nashville, and Carruthers’ sister, Tonya Carruthers, will help deliver it and speak at a rally.

The same WSMV report says Kim Kardashian urged a stop in an Instagram story, writing that Carruthers would be executed "without testing DNA and fingerprint evidence that could prove his innocence."

The Intercept

The Intercept describes how Carruthers’s supporters point to Alfredo Shaw, a longtime Shelby County Jail employee’s account of being a witness in the 1994 triple homicide, and says Shaw claimed Carruthers confessed to him.

The Intercept also quotes a Shelby County District Attorney’s Office response to Carruthers’s post-conviction attorneys, saying: "neither is aware of any situation where Alfredo Shaw acted as a paid informant for anybody," while the enclosed records described by the Intercept say Shaw was a paid confidential informant.

In the Intercept’s account, Carruthers is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday morning at 10 a.m., and it says supporters delivered a stack of petitions to the office of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee at the state Capitol in Nashville on Monday.

Beyond the dispute over evidence, the Memphis Flyer reports that lawyers fear the state will use expired drugs for Carruthers’s execution, noting that while the state is allowed to use expired drugs, they could "act unpredictably, cause severe pain, and/or fail to induce unconsciousness."

The Memphis Flyer attributes that warning to Drew Brazer, an Assistant Federal Prosecutor in the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, and says Brazer cited an email showing the state spent $625,000 on execution-related services.

The same report says Amy Harwell, First Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Tennessee, said: "But the protocol seems to allow TDOC to use expired drugs."

The Intercept adds that Carruthers has maintained his innocence for 32 years and that no physical evidence implicated him in the murders, with fingerprints from the crime scene never linked to anyone and a blanket buried with the victims shown to have an unknown male DNA profile.

As the execution approaches, the Intercept reports that Carruthers’s supporters delivered petitions to Gov. Bill Lee’s office despite mounting calls for him to stop the execution, and it says on Tuesday Lee announced he would not intervene.