Death row exonerees and innocence advocates are calling on Gov. Bill Lee to halt the May 21 execution of Tony Carruthers to allow for DNA testing on evidence his attorneys said could prove his innocence.
“[DNA] doesn’t take sides,” Tennessee Innocence Project Executive Director Jason Gichner said. “It’s not pro-prosecution, it’s not pro-defense. Law enforcement uses DNA all the time to solve cold cases and at the same time we can use DNA to vindicate innocent people by testing evidence to prove that they didn’t commit the crime.”
Carruthers was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois, and Anderson’s friend Frederick Tucker in a 1996 trial in which he represented himself. His attorneys at the Federal Public Defender’s office in Nashville have argued that his severe mental illness makes him legally incompetent to be executed, detailing in legal filings the psychotic delusions they say have led him to believe he will soon be released. A judge in Memphis rejected those claims in March. But Carruthers has also maintained his innocence, with attorneys and advocates highlighting the fact that his conviction was based on circumstantial evidence and testimony from a paid informant.
Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to order DNA analysis of evidence that has never been tested. The ACLU is also seeking testing on unmatched fingerprints from the case. A state court has since denied that request, a decision the ACLU is now challenging in federal court.
Executioners in Tennessee have killed 10 death row prisoners at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution since 2018, including three last year. Carruthers is one of four people scheduled for execution in the state this year.
On Thursday morning, three people who served time on death row before proving their innocence held a press conference at the Cordell Hull State Office Building to ask the governor to intervene.
“Why did I drive 200 miles to come here and speak?” asked Ray Krone, who was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Arizona in 1992 and exonerated in 2002. “Because I walked in Tony Carruthers’s shoes.”
Sabrina Butler-Smith was sentenced to death for murder after the 1989 death of her 9-month-old son and spent more than six years on Mississippi’s death row before she was released in 1995. She was the first woman in the United States ever exonerated from death row. She said she could be dead by now if not for the attorneys and advocates who stepped in to help her, and she asked Gov. Lee to make sure Carruthers has the same chance.
The National Registry of Exonerations lists 144 people who have been exonerated while on American death rows since 1989.
“We’re asking the governor to just, please, look at this,” she said. “Give him a chance to prove. That’s only fair. Why would you let somebody that potentially committed the crime walk free when you have a person that’s incarcerated that didn’t do it?”
Echoing that request was Ndume Olatushani, the Memphis man who spent nearly 27 years in prison, including 20 on Tennessee’s death row. Olatushani always maintained his innocence. After the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals found in 1999 that prosecutors had suppressed potentially exculpatory evidence in his case, he was resentenced to life. Olatushani and his attorney spent many more years fighting to get him a new trial and in 2012 he accepted what’s known as an Alford plea from the state — a deal allowing him to plead guilty, while continuing to assert his innocence, in exchange for his release.
Olatushani said Thursday that he and Carruthers had been friends since they met in the Shelby County jail decades ago and that he’d talked to him recently.
“I don’t know that I want to get into the conversation that I had with him,” Olatushani said. “But … the 21st is like tomorrow for someone sitting where he’s sitting. I will tell you this, he and his family are very stressed and worried about what’s actually happening.”
Krone, Butler-Smith and Olatushani all currently live in Tennessee.
Gichner said he wasn’t in attendance to make an argument about the death penalty or other sentences. Rather, he highlighted the fallibility of the criminal justice system.
“Human beings are not perfect,” he said. “We make mistakes. We get things wrong. We often hear about the cases where there are bad actors, somebody who lies, cheats, steals, withholds evidence. Put all of that aside. Just think about the fact that we are imperfect and any system that is run by human beings, no matter what it is, is going to have an error rate.”
In the last five years in Tennessee, Gichner said, 10 innocent people have been exonerated after serving a combined 300-plus years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 144 people who have been exonerated while on American death rows since 1989.
In Tennessee, three men have been exonerated while on death row. That figure doesn’t count cases like Olatushani’s, where new evidence led to a person’s release if not official exoneration, or that of Sedley Alley, in which family members and attorneys have said there is reason to believe an innocent man was executed.
Source: nashvillebanner.com, Steven Hale, May 1, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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