On 21 May, Tony Carruthers had an experience that few others have had. He was taken to the execution chamber, where the state of Tennessee began the process of putting him to death, but it failed to finish what it started.

Carruthers was not killed and he lived to tell about it. He became the ninth person to survive a failed execution in the last 80 years.

Botched executions are by now quite common in the United States. But on most of those occasions, the people whose executions go awry end up dead.

But not Tony Carruthers.

He was convicted of the 1994 kidnappings and murders of Marcellos Anderson; Delois Anderson, his mother; and Frederick Tucker. But the case against Carruthers was flawed from the start.

The state did not provide fingerprints or any other physical evidence linking Carruthers to the crime. It did have a DNA sample that Carruthers later contended would not, if tested, be a match with him. That meant that the decisive evidence against him at trial was provided by witnesses who testified they had heard him confess, one of whom was a jailhouse informant.

And as if that was not enough, Carruthers had to represent himself in his trial, after he received what he considered inadequate representation by court-appointed lawyers. According to the lawyers now representing him, “paranoia and delusions” kept Carruthers from cooperating with his court-appointed counsel. But, as the AP puts it, the judge “viewed the behavior as willful”. The Tennessee supreme court agreed that Carruthers was responsible for his situation.

Even after those rulings, the problems in Carruthers’ case should have been enough to give officials in Tennessee pause. About 130,000 people signed a petition asking Bill Lee, the governor, to do just that so that the DNA could be tested, or to exercise his clemency power. Lee was unmoved.

Tennessee went ahead with his execution anyway but couldn’t finish what it started. After the failure, Lee gave Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

That is........

© The Guardian