Tony Carruthers is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on Thursday, and his legal team is pressing the state for assurances that the drugs used in lethal injection will not have expired by the time of the procedure. Attorneys for Carruthers said they raised the concern after asking the Tennessee Department of Correction twice last month whether it had secured the appropriate drugs for the execution date and whether those drugs would still be within their expiration window.
In a response to one of the inquiries, Assistant Attorney General John W. Ayers did not directly answer whether the drugs were secured and would remain unexpired, but said the department would comply with its lethal injection protocol. That protocol, Ayers said, includes regular inventory practices meant to monitor expiration dates, according to the reporting described in the case coverage.
Carruthers’ lawyers said they followed up with additional concerns that Tennessee was not providing the same kind of assurance to Carruthers that it previously provided to another inmate. Federal Public Defender Amy Harwell, speaking in an email and later in a follow-up, described expiration dates as a measure of when a drug can no longer be safely relied upon to obtain the desired results in an execution setting.
Harwell wrote that, in the execution context, expired chemicals “may mean a slow, lingering death without a reliable loss of consciousness, as the body painfully and fitfully shuts down.” She made the case that the state’s pattern of responses raised serious concerns about what the Tennessee Department of Correction plans to use.
Reporting also describes that the Associated Press asked the Tennessee Department of Correction on Wednesday whether the drugs it planned to use to kill Carruthers are expired, and the department declined to answer. The same reporting said Gov. Bill Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a similar inquiry.
The attorneys’ challenge comes as multiple states have faced public and legal pressure surrounding the availability of lethal injection drugs and the information they choose to disclose. In South Carolina, the reporting says executions were on hold for 12 years while the state struggled to obtain drugs, and the state eventually carried out executions only after passing a shield law intended to keep the identity of the supplier secret.
Tennessee has argued in court that its “shield” extends beyond supplier identity to other information, according to the reporting. The coverage says that just before a December execution of Harold Nichols, Tennessee Deputy Attorney General Cody Brandon offered instead to provide a declaration “attesting that the chemicals to be used in Mr. Nichols’ execution will not expire before his execution and have not expired,” based on a transcript of proceedings.
The reporting says Harwell argued that Tennessee’s willingness to provide those assurances in the Nichols matter, but not in Carruthers’ case, created additional reasons for concern. Tennessee and other states have also had high-profile difficulties tied to execution drugs in recent years, including what the reporting describes as problems with purity and potency testing and legal challenges that followed.
The Associated Press account traces those broader challenges by pointing to examples from other states, including Arkansas, Idaho and Texas. It says Arkansas tried to beat expiration deadlines in 2017, executing four prisoners while the other four received stays, and that Arkansas has had no executions since in part due to difficulty obtaining drugs. The reporting also says Idaho changed its primary method to firing squad in part because of difficulty getting lethal injection drugs, after drugs were returned to a supplier because they were expired.
In Tennessee, the reporting says Oscar Smith came within minutes of being executed in 2022 before Gov. Bill Lee issued a reprieve that revealed concerns about the state’s testing for purity and potency, leading to an independent investigation and a pause on executions for two years. The coverage says executions restarted in 2025 after Tennessee released a new lethal injection process in December 2024, and that some inmates have sued, arguing the Department of Correction did not follow recommendations from the investigation.
The reporting adds that even under the new process, executions have not always gone smoothly, describing what Byron Black said during his execution in August that he was “hurting so bad,” while noting that prison officials offered no explanation for the cause of the pain.