The lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol is getting a major update. On Friday morning, a Davidson County judge signed off on a re-written complaint that documents issues in each of the executions carried out under the new protocol.
The complaint includes detailed accounts of the failed attempt to execute both Christa Pike and Tony Carruthers this year, as well as problems that arose in the other executions throughout 2025 and 2026.
The state released its latest execution manual in January 2025. Shortly afterward, attorneys who represent several death row inmates filed Burns v. Strada. The original complaint said the policy would violate their clients’ rights. It argued that the actual written policy was inadequate to protect their clients, and also the Department of Correction’s track record made it likely that without ample protections, the agency was likely to force their clients to suffer needless pain.
Lawyers from the attorney general’s office, who are representing the Department of Correction, have spent the past year and a half arguing that lawsuit was too speculative. It hinged on predicting what could go wrong.
The plaintiffs note that Tennessee has initiated six executions under the protocol.
“Now, however, the truth is unmistakable: the 2025 Lethal Injection Protocol has led to multiple actual botched executions, including what was arguably the most egregiously and torturously botched execution by lethal injection in American history,” the plaintiffs wrote in their motion.
That last bit is referring to Pike’s failed execution. She is the first person on record who survived being administered two doses of lethal injection drugs, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Friday’s hearing in Davidson County Chancery Court
Attorneys for the state didn’t necessarily oppose re-writing the complaint. That’s what they wrote in court filings and what they told Chancellor Russell T. Perkins during a hearing on Friday. They were raising concerns about legal technicalities in the original complain, and arguing that the plaintiffs were using the wrong legal mechanism to make their arguments.
“I’m not ruling on all of these things lurking under the surface,” Perkins said. “I’m ruling on the motion to supplement.”
Perkins granted the motion.
Re-written complaint
The plaintiffs uploaded a document spanning nearly 400 pages a few weeks ago. It adds a large number of factual allegations to the original complaint. They touch on each execution carried out under the new protocol.
It explains that during the first execution under the new protocol, TDOC failed to put printer paper into the EKG machine that was monitoring Oscar Franklin Smith’s heart activity. His execution took place in May of 2025.
That’s an issue because those read outs help ensure that the inmate was actually dead during the time of death.
A few months later, TDOC executed Byron Black. That made headlines, since Black had said during the process that he was in pain, groaned, and lifted his head after the drugs had started.
The EKG machine was loaded with paper that time, and the readout later showed that Black was displaying a normal heart rhythm for several minutes after his pronounced time of death.
The doctor staffing the execution said in a deposition that he wasn’t checking the EKG when determining whether Black was dead, relying instead on a pulse check and listening for heart sounds with the stethoscope. A medical expert contracted by the plaintiffs testified in the supplemental complaint that sedatives, like the pentobarbital used in executions, can make heart sounds quieter and harder to detect.
Harold Wayne Nichols was the third person executed in 2025. The complaint notes that his autopsy and Black’s both showed signs of pulmonary edema. That’s a form of lung damage that can cause the sensation of drowning. A 2020 NPR investigation found this form of damage was common among those who had died of lethal injection. Drugs at such a high dose can damage several organs. Pentobarbital specifically is alkaline, like drain cleaner, medical experts in this lawsuit have explained.
The new complaint provides an in-depth play-by-play of Tony Carruthers’ failed execution in May. That was the first execution scheduled in 2026. It described how staff and the contracted doctor spent over an hour trying to establish IV access and a central line, ultimately leaving Carruthers alive with at least a dozen puncture wounds and possibly internal damage. TDOC refused to allow an independent medical exam after the failed attempt.
The complaint details the execution of Darrell Hines this August, explaining that he was already in poor health after two recent strokes. He, like the other prisoners TDOC successfully put to death, showed signs of labored breathing and had his face turn purple.
The new complaint offers several details about Pike’s attempted execution that haven’t been widely discussed. For example, one of Pike’s attorneys is quoted in the complaint saying the staff announced several times that it had successfully placed an IV, only to realize they had in reality failed. It explains that at no point did the doctor attempt to place a central line.
Under the protocol, no one who is actually involved in the execution is visible. The IV team works while a curtain over the witness bay is closed, and the members leave before the curtain is open. The IVs run through a channel in the wall into a hidden antechamber. That’s the location of the TDOC staffers who actually manage and inject the chemicals. Those people can see a video feed of the prisoners’ bodies; there’s a camera placed directly above them in the death chamber.
According to the supplemental complaint, people in that antechamber called into the death chamber several times, telling the IV team to check the injection site on Pike’s left arm. It says the warden, Kenneth Nelsen, told the workers that the issue was only that the tape was too tight, and the people in the antechamber at some point started pushing the drugs without having the IV adjusted.
The rest of the account, including Pike’s continual talking and sighing after the first dose of drugs was completed, and the long wait for an ambulance, have been in media reports.
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