Capital Defender’s Eyewitness Account of Tennessee’s Botched Execution of Her Client

In a June 1, 2026, op-ed in The New York Times, Maria DeLiberato, senior coun­sel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Capital Punishment Project, offers a first-per­son account of the May 21 attempt by Tennessee to exe­cute her client, Tony Carruthers — and the hour of suf­fer­ing she wit­nessed before Governor Bill Lee called off his execution.

Ms. DeLiberato, who joined Mr. Carruthers’ legal team just two months before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion date, describes enter­ing the exe­cu­tion cham­ber hav­ing already exhaust­ed every legal avenue to halt the exe­cu­tion, includ­ing an attempt to com­pel DNA test­ing of unmatched and uniden­ti­fied crime scene evi­dence. From the moment she arrived, she began tak­ing notes of what she saw. Notably, Tennessee bars media wit­ness­es from observ­ing the IV inser­tion process, mak­ing attor­neys like Ms. DeLiberato among the few peo­ple with direct knowl­edge of what tran­spired in the execution chamber.

She recounts exe­cu­tion team mem­bers going through nee­dles as they searched for a usable vein — in Mr. Carruthers’ arms, his hands, his feet, and his jugu­lar. After about thir­ty min­utes of attempts to set an IV line, a physi­cian entered and took over, even­tu­al­ly decid­ing to attempt a cen­tral line, an inva­sive pro­ce­dure requir­ing a punc­ture of the neck, chest, or groin. Ms. DeLiberato’s imme­di­ate objec­tion to the war­den was ignored. Court fil­ings from 2025 indi­cate the physi­cian asked to par­tic­i­pate in the exe­cu­tion had not estab­lished a cen­tral line in more than a decade and held no cur­rent hos­pi­tal priv­i­leges autho­riz­ing him to do so any­where in the United States.

When the doc­tor pressed into Mr. Carruthers’ chest in efforts to set the cen­tral line, Mr. Carruthers cried out and began groan­ing. Before this attempt, the doc­tor admin­is­tered a shot of lido­caine and asked prison staff whether ​“the patient” was aller­gic to it. Ms. DeLiberato not­ed the irony of this ques­tion, ​“as though [the cham­ber] exist­ed to heal.” The use of clin­i­cal lan­guage is inten­tion­al, accord­ing to Ms. DeLiberato, ​“intend­ed to cre­ate emo­tion­al dis­tance.” The doc­tor was ulti­mate­ly unable to estab­lish a cen­tral line, dur­ing which time Mr. Carruthers’ con­tin­ued to groan and sweat. Nearly 90 min­utes after the attempt­ed exe­cu­tion began, a phone in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber rang, the war­den answered, lis­tened, hung-up, and told every­one in the cham­ber that Gov. Lee had called off the execution.

Ms. DeLiberato frames the break­down in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber not as an aber­ra­tion but as a win­dow into Tennessee’ cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem. She wrote, “[w]hen I saw the process unrav­el­ing with my own eyes, it became clear that the over­rid­ing imper­a­tive was not com­pe­tence or even the appear­ance of pro­fes­sion­al­ism. It was com­ple­tion.” She writes that she arrived at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution well aware of Tennessee’s pre­vi­ous lethal injec­tion com­pli­ca­tions, but “[n]othing pre­pared [her] to wit­ness the agony that Mr. Carruthers expe­ri­enced in the exe­cu­tion cham­ber.” Reflecting on the exe­cu­tion process itself, Ms. DeLiberato writes that “[t]he state works hard to wrap exe­cu­tions in clin­i­cal lan­guage, but inside that room, there was no escap­ing the real­i­ty of what was happening.”