Tennessee’s attempt to execute Tony Carruthers failed. It must not try again | Austin Sarat

Carruthers' court case was fraught with problems. A second execution attempt would be the kind of cruelty no decent society should countenance

On 21 May, Tony Carruthers had an experience that few others have had. He was taken to the execution chamber, where the state of Tennessee began the process of putting him to death, but it failed to finish what it started.

Carruthers was not killed and he lived to tell about it. He became the ninth person to survive a failed execution in the last 80 years.

Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty