Tennessee aborts execution attempt after struggling to find vein

By Jonathan Allen

May 21 (Reuters) – Tennessee prison officials aborted their attempt to execute a man convicted of murders on Thursday after failing to find a suitable vein for a lethal injection.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee later granted a one-year reprieve from execution to Tony Carruthers, 57, who was sentenced to death after he was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994.

After Carruthers was taken to the execution chamber at a maximum-security prison in Nashville, prison officials spent more than an hour trying to establish an intravenous line before calling off the execution and returning him to his cell, according to an Associated Press reporter present as a media witness.

Prison officials were able to set up a primary intravenous line, the Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement, but struggled to establish a “backup line” required by the state’s lethal injection protocol.

“I am granting Tony Von Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year,” Lee said in a statement.

Carruthers becomes at least the seventh man to survive his execution date in the U.S. after a botched lethal injection attempt, according to the abolitionist group Reprieve.

“Lethal injection is touted as a humane, ‘medical’ method of execution. Bloody and prolonged execution attempts like this one expose the gruesome reality,” Matt Wells, Reprieve’s U.S. deputy director, said in a statement.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New YorkEditing by Bill Berkrot)