In October, the Tennessee Supreme Court ordered the state to execute Tony Carruthers on May 21 to carry out the death sentence given to him by a Shelby County jury in 1996. Barring an extraordinary development, there is good reason to believe the state will do so, whether by lethal injection or the electric chair. Executioners at Nashville’s Riverbend Maximum Security Institution have brought 10 men to the prison’s death chamber since 2018, including three last year. Carruthers is one of four people scheduled for execution this year, a group that includes the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
But Carruthers’s attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s office wrote in a filing last month that their client is gripped by psychotic delusions that have led him to believe that he will not be put to death and, moreover, that his release from prison is imminent. He suffers from schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, they wrote, and is so severely mentally ill that he is not legally competent to be executed.
Senior Judge Mark Ward will hold a hearing on that question in Memphis starting Monday.
Carruthers has been on death row for 30 years, since he and a man named James Montgomery were convicted for the kidnapping and murder of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois, and Anderson’s friend Frederick Tucker. After running off six defense attorneys and having his request for a seventh denied, Carruthers represented himself at the trial in 1996. His defense was not just unsuccessful but fatally flawed, according to his attorneys, who wrote in a 2019 filing that his cross-examination of a critical prosecution witness was “one of the most singularly inept, ineffective and disastrous cross-examinations, possible, one that seemed designed to secure not only a guilty verdict, but a death sentence.” As further evidence that Carruthers had been utterly incompetent to defend himself in a capital trial, they also pointed to his failure to dispute a medical examiner’s disturbing and damning conclusion that the victims had been buried alive. That claim, which was heavily relied upon by prosecutors, was later refuted by forensic experts who could have been called to testify at trial and eventually disavowed by the original medical examiner. It was “inevitable,” Carruthers’s attorneys wrote, that a “mentally ill defendant” forced to represent himself “would fail to see the relevancy” of the issue.
Now, they argued, that same mental illness has rendered him unable to rationally understand why the state is seeking to execute him. That’s the legal threshold established by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2007.
In their February filing, they stated that Carruthers is aware his execution date has been set based on his murder conviction, but that his mental illness has clouded his understanding of that fact. They wrote that he has a “pervasive and all-consuming obsession that a cabal of corrupt judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys have conspired to secure his conviction and death sentence.” According to the filing, Carruthers believes that his execution date is merely a threat to get him to accept a plea deal in his case — despite no such deal being on offer — and thus forfeit the millions of dollars in financial damages he would win if the conspiracy was exposed. Believing that his (transparently recorded) calls from the prison are being illegally wiretapped, and that each instance of that crime would entitle him to $3.3 million, his attorneys note that he has called the Federal Public Defender’s office as many as 300 times in a single day.
So certain is Carruthers in the obvious truth of his theories, his attorneys wrote, that he speaks often of his forthcoming release, has told his daughter that he will need an apartment, and asks paralegal staff to “to research things to prepare for his release including, but not limited to, things he will purchase upon release and receipt of his massive settlement such as cars, luxury homes [and] a Captain D’s franchise.”
At this week’s hearing, Carruthers’s attorneys will call Dr. Bhushan Agharka, a forensic psychiatrist who evaluated him in 2011, to testify about Carruthers’ mental incompetence. Carruthers has refused to cooperate with psychiatric evaluations in advance of the hearing and is adamant that he does not suffer from any mental illness. In a report filed with the court last week, Agharka said that was not surprising.
“Mr. Carruthers’s lack of insight is typical of persons with psychotic illness,” Agharka wrote. “It is not volitional or purposeful, but rather, he exists in a delusional world that appears “normal” to him and is thus akin to asking a fish what water is.”
But the state has filed reports from two experts arguing that Carruthers is fit to be executed.
A report from Dr. Thomas Schacht points to the “researched, organized, and legally reasoned pro se legal filings and institutional grievances” Carruthers has been filing for years as reason to doubt that he is severely mentally ill. He dismisses evidence of mental illness during Carruthers’ childhood as thin, arguing that defense attorneys took “adolescent episodes of disorderly and criminal delinquent behavior and retrospectively attribute[d] them to mental illness.” As for Carruthers’ turbulent relationship with the attorneys who have represented him over the years, Schacht said mental health professionals were not in a position to evaluate their legal representation of him.
“This limits and complicates the ability of a mental health professional to form an opinion as to whether and to what extent Mr. Carruthers’ behavior toward his attorneys is a sign of mental illness or delusion versus an uncivilized personality-disordered response to a real problem,” Schacht wrote.
He posited that the latter, a constellation of personality disorders, was the more plausible diagnosis for Carruthers.
The state’s second expert, Dr. Eric Engum, concurred in a report of his own, writing that Agharka was “the first and only mental health professional over a period of 43 years to diagnose Mr. Carruthers with a psychiatric/psychological disorder implicating some form of psychosis.”
Of Carruthers’s disastrous self-representation at trial, Engum wrote that just because the defense was ineffective doesn’t mean it was “inherently illogical, delusional or nonsensical.” Both experts for the state argued that while Carruthers’s theory of the case may not be factually correct, it has been largely consistent and is theoretically possible.
Death penalty history suggests Carruthers’s legal chances are slim. Schacht noted in his report that as of 2024, only 28 people in the U.S. had successfully challenged their competency to be executed. If the courts decide that Carruthers is legally competent, then prison officials will almost certainly be coming to him on April 21 asking him to make another legal decision — whether to die on the gurney or in the electric chair.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.