Racial Justice

ACLU comments on the state of Tennessee's botched and torturous attempt to execute Tony Carruthers

Federal Lawsuit Aims to Halt Map Before August Primary

ACLU-TN leads dual actions against government overreach with a Mason, TN vigil condemning ICE detentions and a court brief opposing the National Guard deployment.

Tennessee’s Aggravated Prostitution statute and related sex offender registration requirements are unconstitutional and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), according to our federal lawsuit filed against the state.

Tony’s conviction was based on testimony from paid jailhouse informants, and there has never been physical evidence linking him to the crime. In 2011, Tony's co-defendant said that Tony was not involved, and pointed investigators to a different man. There are unmatched fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene that we know don't match Tony. Those prints and DNA have never been compared to the alternative suspect. The ACLU filed a motion for DNA testing in the Tennessee Supreme Court asking the state to compare the unknown male DNA to the alternative suspect identified by Tony's co-defendant in 2011 and to do sampling of three additional items that have never been subject to testing. On April 28, the ACLU filed a Section 1983 lawsuit in federal court challenging the state’s denial of a motion to test unidentified fingerprint evidence that does not match Tony. The complaint also challenges the court’s refusal to consider new evidence that the prosecutors hid the fact that its main witness was a paid confidential informant as well as the 2011 statement from the now-released co-defendant exonerating Tony and pointing to an alternate suspect. Before the state carries out an execution, it should answer the most basic question: did they get the right person? In this case, Tennessee has the evidence to help answer that question and must test it before they execute the wrong man. Read the clemency petition here. Evidence at Trial With no physical evidence linking Tony to the crime scene, the case against him is built on testimony from paid informants, which is widely known to be one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Alfredo Shaw, a career informant, testified to the Grand Jury that Tony confessed to him. That testimony was the main reason prosecutors were able to charge Tony at all. Shaw later recanted in a TV interview, saying the confession never happened. At trial, prosecutors did not call Shaw as a witness. Tony, who had been denied counsel and forced to represent himself, called Shaw as part of his defense. Before Shaw testified, prosecutors threatened him with perjury charges if he contradicted his original Grand Jury testimony. Under that pressure, Shaw repeated the confession story to the jury. The jury was not informed that Shaw had secretly been working as a paid informant for the state. During Shaw’s testimony, Tony directly asked him if he ever worked as a confidential informant. The prosecutor, knowing that Shaw was indeed a paid informant, objected to relevance, and the court sustained the objection. The State continued to deny that Shaw was a paid informant for the next three decades, until evidence uncovered in 2024 confirmed that the state had paid him. The sudden disclosure appeared to be due to the opening of a conviction integrity review unit within the state attorney’s office. Tony's Self-Representation Tony was forced to represent himself at trial after the trial court became frustrated with his repeated firing of appointed counsel. Tony never sought self-representation and repeatedly requested counsel. Because Tony didn’t have a lawyer, key aspects of the prosecution’s case went unchallenged, including the circumstances surrounding Shaw's statements and his relationship with the state. Tony's trial was so filled with errors due to his forced self-representation that on appeal the court found that his co-defendant, deserved a new trial. Tony's co-defendant ultimately took an Alford plea, received a 27-year sentence, and was released in 2015. If Tony is executed, he would be the first person in nearly a century to be put to death after being forced to represent himself at trial. Untested Fingerprint and DNA Evidence In 1994, investigators collected fingerprint evidence from one of the victim's homes, where the victims were kidnapped from. They recovered multiple prints from the house in locations that the facts suggest the kidnapper would have touched: doorknobs and a phone receiver. None of the prints match Tony, and there is no other physical evidence tying him to the scene of the crime. In 2011, Tony's co-defendant gave a statement to an investigator that Tony was not involved in the kidnapping or the murders and pointed them to a different man. That suspect's fingerprints have never been compared to the unidentified prints recovered from the crime scene. The jury was never told about the unidentified prints, that Tony's prints weren’t found at the house, or that prints from the person who is most likely responsible for the kidnapping were never compared. To this day, there are still 6 unmatched fingerprints from the scene. In September 2021, Tony filed a pro se motion for fingerprint testing. In January 2026, after his execution date had been set, Tony’s lawyers filed a supplemental pleading, which included his co-defendant's disclosure about the alternative suspect as well as the State’s decades-long concealment of Alfredo’s Shaw’s status as a paid informant. The state court denied his request on the grounds that the testing could not exclude Tony's participation. More troubling, the state court held that the new information about Alfredo Shaw as well as the statement implicating the alternative suspect could not be considered, finding that Tennessee law limits defendants to the universe of information that was available at the time of trial or arrest. In addition to the unidentified fingerprint evidence, there is unknown male DNA on a piece of fabric used to bind the victims. When the state ran DNA testing, the results excluded Tony and his co-defendant. The ACLU has active lawsuits in state and federal court, urging the state to stay the execution until they consider all the evidence and compare the DNA and fingerprints that do not match Tony to the alternative suspect identified by Tony’s co-defendant in 2011.

Tennessee saw a surge in voter registrations during the 2018 midterms. Lawmakers passed a measure that creates criminal and civil penalties against those who submit “incomplete” applications. The threat of penalty will chill registration efforts and make ours the only state with such penalties.

ACLU-TN has had an ongoing concern over police surveillance of Memphis residents engaging in protected free speech activities for many decades.