The evidence a death row prisoner hopes will save him from execution after 30 years
A Tennessee man due to be executed in a matter of weeks is now relying on something saving him that barely featured when he was convicted — DNA.
Tony Von Carruthers is scheduled to die at the hands of the state on May 21, after being being found guilty of a triple murder dating back more than 30 years.
A new legal push from his attorneys, however, claims that key forensic evidence still hasn’t been properly tested and could yet prove pivotal in seeing his conviction quashed.
At this extremely late stage it’s perhaps his only hope of avoiding receiving a lethal injection.
At the centre of it all is a single, as-yet-unidentified DNA profile that was recovered from the scene. It’s never been matched to anyone. Carruthers and his legal team are hoping that it’s enough to throw serious reasonable doubt over his guilt.
The case goes back to March 1994, when three bodies were found buried beneath a casket in a Memphis graveyard. Marcellos ‘Cello’ Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson and Frederick Tucker had been missing for a week after being taken from Delois Anderson’s home.
Police were led to the burial site by a man named Jonathan Montgomery. From there, attention also turned to him and his brother, James Montgomery. And to an associate of theirs — Carruthers.
Prosecutors said that the group had kidnapped Marcellos Anderson as part of a robbery plan. Before the case even reached trial, Jonathan Montgomery was found hanged in his cell.
Carruthers and James Montgomery were tried together in 1996 and both men were convicted of three counts of first-degree pre-meditated murder. Each received a death sentence and have both been sitting on death row waiting to be executed ever since.
Years later, things started to shift a little. An appeals court ruled that James Montgomery hadn’t received a fair trial, overturning his conviction and granting him a retrial. Although Carruthers’ conviction stayed in place and his execution date edged ever closer.
The latest motion, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with the Tennessee Supreme Court on April 9, goes straight at the lack of any actual physical evidence connecting Carruthers specifically to the crime.
‘There has never been any physical evidence linking Mr. Carruthers to the crime and the case against him was built on testimony from jailhouse informants, widely known to be one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions,’ the ACLU said in a press release.
Part of that centres on fingerprints that were recovered from the scene. According to the filing, six prints were identified that didn’t match Carruthers or Montgomery.
The jury never heard about that, though. Carruthers ended up representing himself at trial after things broke down with multiple different lawyers.
By the time the case actually reached court, he’d gone through a full six attorneys.
His current legal team says the previous defence he presented on behalf of himself was ‘inept, ineffective and disastrous’.
They argued that Carruthers was ‘mentally ill, irrational and incompetent to stand trial’ at the time of his arrest.
It was later judged that James Montgomery was deprived of a fair trial due to Carruthers’ self-representation. He was granted a retrial, where he requested DNA analysis from both the home and the grave site.
‘Testing did not reveal any DNA matches to Mr. Montgomery or Mr. Carruthers on the evidence,’ the motion states.
A lot of the samples were too limited to produce a usable profile with the technology that was available at the time. Some were inconclusive, while others matched the victims. One didn’t.
‘However, there was one robust male profile on a white blanket that was buried with the victims,’ ACLU argue. That profile still hasn’t been identified.
Montgomery later accepted a plea deal reducing his charges to three counts of second-degree murder. While serving his sentence, he gave a statement that now sits right in the middle of Carruthers’ latest attempt to reopen the case.
In 2010, Montgomery told an investigator that he’d carried out parts of the kidnapping himself and named another man as being involved.
The motion states: ‘In 2010, co-defendant James Montgomery, while serving out his remaining sentence, gave a statement to an investigator with the Capital Habeas Unit indicating that he kidnapped Marcellos and Fred and that he dispatched Ronnie ‘Eyeball’ Irving to kidnap Ms. Anderson. He confirmed to the investigator that Mr. Carruthers was not involved in the kidnapping or the murders.’
Montgomery was released back in 2016. The man he named, Ronnie ‘Eyeball’ Irving, was killed in 2002, but his DNA and fingerprints are still on record.
‘His fingerprints and a DNA sample are on file at the medical examiner’s office,’ the motion said. ‘To date, the unidentified physical evidence (the latent fingerprints or unknown male DNA profile) has not been compared to Mr. Irving.’
Carruthers’ lawyers are now asking for the unidentified DNA and fingerprints to be tested against Irving.
‘Mr. Carruthers anticipates that, if granted, the DNA testing itself will be concluded prior to his May 21st execution date, so this Motion for Testing, in and of itself, is unlikely to affect the timing of his scheduled execution,’ the motion read.
‘However, if the DNA results confirm Mr. Carruthers’ innocence or cast doubt on the appropriateness of his death sentence, Mr. Carruthers will move to stay his execution.’
There’s already been one knockback in the recent appeals. Carruthers also sought fingerprint testing through the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, but that request was denied this week.
‘The Court does not find that a reasonable probability exists that the petitioner would not have been prosecuted or convicted if the hoped-for results are obtained through the requested fingerprint analysis,’ the court wrote.
So this is where it sits right now… An execution date in place, a DNA profile with no name attached to it and a legal argument that says that might matter more than anything else left in the case file.
Cases like this do sometimes turn. And occasionally they go right to the wire. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 34 people across 15 states have been exonerated from death row using DNA evidence since 1993.
Not all of them do turn, though. The US Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal from a Texas death row inmate who argued that DNA testing could prove his innocence.
For Carruthers, it comes down to whether that unidentified DNA stays as an unresolved detail or ends up being a factor that could savee the man’s life.