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Tennessee Plans Another Execution Despite Its Brutal Recent Mistakes

Despite a record of botched executions, three states including Tennessee plan to kill by lethal injection on Thursday.

In early August, on the one-year anniversary of his father’s death, Samson Childs invited his godfather out to eat at a Wingstop on Nashville’s south side, not far from where his dad grew up. Hanging out with his godfather was a way for Childs to feel close to his father, Byron Black, who died at 69. “We talked and we cried and he gave me good memories – just old stories of my dad, him growing up, and how they stuck together,” Childs said.

Black spent more than three decades on death row before he was killed by lethal injection on August 5, 2025, at Tennessee’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. He’d been convicted in 1989 for killing his girlfriend, Angela Clay, along with her two young daughters. Black insisted he did not commit the horrific murders, but was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to die.

Over the decades that followed, Black’s lawyers argued that his intellectual disability should have barred him from facing the death penalty. The DA’s office that convicted him even conceded that they were right, but the courts disagreed. By the time Tennessee prepared to kill him, Black had been diagnosed with dementia, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure.

“How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?”

“How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?”

Defense attorneys argued that Black’s poor health put him at serious risk of a tortuous execution, raising specific concerns over his implanted heart defibrillator and pacemaker. Experts warned that the device could deliver painful shocks before he died. To their dismay, Black did suffer on the gurney – although not for the reasons they most feared. Prison staff struggled to insert an IV in Black’s arm, spilling blood on the floor. The drug that was supposed to kill him – a massive dose of the fast-acting barbiturate pentobarbital – did not work as intended. Media witnesses said they could hear Black moaning in pain.

Childs was not at the prison on the morning his father was killed. He was at home in Nashville after a sleepless night. “You know, I’m putting myself in his shoes,” he said. “How would I feel knowing that this is my last day on earth?” It wasn’t until he watched a local news segment that Childs learned things had not gone well. “It messed me up, I ain’t gonna lie,” he said. “I can’t imagine being there, viewing this, seeing this happen.”

Black’s execution reignited controversy over capital punishment in Tennessee, where advocates had warned against executing him with a new protocol that had not been subjected to legal review. The one-drug pentobarbital method had been introduced by the state following complications with its previous, three-drug formula, which was itself adopted despite ample warnings that it violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Nevertheless, Tennessee pressed forward – with disturbingly predictable results.

On May 21, just nine months after Black’s painful death, Tennessee attempted to kill 57-year-old Tony Carruthers, convicted in 1996 of a triple murder he swore he did not commit. As in Black’s case, prison staff tried clumsily to place the IV lines for lethal injection. But this time they never finished. Carruthers spent 40 minutes being poked and prodded, only for a physician to enter the chamber and attempt to place what is known as a central line in his chest. The descriptions of what followed were harrowing. As Carruthers’s attorney, Maria DeLiberato would later write, “I saw the process unraveling with my own eyes.”

False Testimony Sent Tony Carruthers to Death Row. Tennessee Wants to Kill Him Anyway.

“The executioners draped Mr. Carruthers in a blue surgical cloth with a hole for his face,” she wrote. “When the doctor prodded Mr. Carruthers’s chest with a scalpel or large needle, Mr. Carruthers cried out in pain. But the doctor continued to push into his chest. Mr. Carruthers started groaning… I told him that I was sorry. Mostly, I tried to hold his gaze and reassure him that we were still fighting for him.”

The ordeal ended only after the........

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