Tony Carruthers : Sane Enough

For months now, my phone has been filling up with messages from a man named Tony Von Carruthers. They arrive through the prison communication system, sometimes more than I can read in a sitting. They say the same things. The same phrases recur. The same fixations. The same accusations against the same enemies, real and imagined. He signs them with hashtags, as though he were posting to a feed on a platform that has no feed, no audience and no way to amplify anything he writes.

I am a spiritual advisor to dozens of condemned men around the country. Half a dozen of them are in Tennessee. Though Carruthers is not one of the guys I advise formally, we have connected enough for me to garner some understanding of where he is. What understanding I have not gained through messages has come through his neighbors. Men who hear him echo off the concrete day and night, blasting out the same phrases he writes to me at a volume audible through cell walls.

On Thursday, May 21, the state of Tennessee plans to execute him.

Lessons from the Past

The question I cannot stop turning over is how the state arrived at the conclusion that Carruthers is sane enough to kill. The Supreme Court has said, twice, that the Constitution forbids executing prisoners who cannot rationally understand why the state intends to put them to death. In Ford v. Wainwright (1986), the Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of a person who is insane. In Panetti v. Quarterman (2007), the Court refined the standard: the prohibition covers defendants who cannot rationally understand why the state is putting them to death. Carruthers, according to psychiatric evidence presented by his attorneys, cannot. He has schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. He has documented brain damage. He believes, in fixed and unshakeable terms, that he will not actually be executed and that his release from prison is imminent. The state of Tennessee, having reviewed this evidence, has decided to proceed.

Tony Carruthers : A Forfeited Right

The decision is not new. It is, in fact, the same decision the state made thirty years ago, when Carruthers stood trial for murder. Then, as now, his mental illness was visible to anyone who looked. He fired his attorneys, threatened them and accused them of conspiring against him…behavior the trial judge interpreted as a willful “forfeiture” of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel rather than as evidence of the illness now slated to kill him. Carruthers repeatedly told the court he could not represent himself and asked for a lawyer. The court nevertheless required him to proceed without counsel. He cross-examined witnesses. He gave a closing argument. He was sentenced to death.

His co-defendant…convicted alongside him in the same trial…was granted a new trial because Carruthers’s self-representation was so prejudicial. That co-defendant later told investigators he believed Carruthers was not involved in the killings and pointed to an alternate suspect whose DNA and fingerprints remain on file, untested. When the Sixth Circuit affirmed the denial of his habeas petition in 2018, Judge Jane Stranch wrote separately to flag her concern. She could not, she said, “agree that a criminal defendant may be denied his Sixth Amendment right to counsel as a form of punishment.” She joined the ruling only because federal habeas review constrained her to. The following year, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case.

The legal failures matter, and they should be argued in every court that will hear them in the time remaining. But the question this case raises is older and larger than its procedural history. What the State of Tennessee is preparing to do on Thursday is execute a man whose conduct at trial, whose inability to assist counsel, whose decades on death row and whose present-day reality have all been shaped by psychiatric illness…the same illness the law claims, in some abstract register, to recognize as a bar to execution.

The architecture is in place. Ford exists. Panetti exists. The Sixth Amendment exists. The men and women who built that architecture meant for it to protect people like Carruthers. It has not.

What I Hear

I have spent enough time on the row to know what mental illness sounds like when it has nowhere to go. It does not look like courtroom performance. It looks like a man typing hashtags into a system that cannot read them, convinced that someone, somewhere, will see. It sounds like the same sentence shouted through concrete for hours at a stretch. It is not a posture. It is not a strategy. It is not, as the State of Tennessee might argue in court, an act.

There was, formally, still time. This week, Governor Bill Lee announced he would not intervene. The Tennessee Supreme Court has yet to order the DNA and fingerprint testing his lawyers have requested. The United States Supreme Court, having declined to review this case once, can still choose to review it again. But what any of those interventions would require is something the system has refused, at every stage of this case, to do…which is to see the man in front of it rather than the conduct his illness produced.

Tony Carruthers’ neighbors on the row see him. His lawyers see him. His clinicians see him. I, in my own limited and pastoral way, see him.

The state has decided not to. On Thursday, it stands prepared to act on its own willful blindness.