Anthony Darrell Hines was put to death by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Thursday morning, ending a 1985 murder case that had drawn a last round of clemency appeals. He was declared dead at 10:43 a.m., about 43 minutes after the injection began at roughly 10 a.m.
Before the injection, Hines told a witness, “Tell my son I love him.” His attorney, Katherine Dix, then released a statement that tried to hold two realities at once: she said she grieved for the family of Catherine Jean Jenkins, while also saying she grieved the violence the State of Tennessee had inflicted on everyone in the room. She said Hines, his son, prison staff and officials had all been forced to witness something that was not normal and should not become routine.
Gov. Bill Lee had already made clear he would not stop the execution. In a statement Tuesday, he said that after deliberate consideration of Hines’ request for clemency and a thorough review of the case, he was upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and did not plan to intervene. Hines had been convicted of first-degree felony murder in the killing of Catherine Jean Jenkins, whose body was found on March 3, 1985, wrapped in a sheet in a room at the CeBon Motel off Interstate 40 in Kingston Springs. Investigators said her clothes had been moved, her undergarments cut away and that she had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and other parts of her body.
The execution came four days after a member of Hines’ family met him for the first time, a detail Dix cited in her statement as she condemned what she called the cruelty of the state’s action. It also came just after a failed execution attempt in Tennessee renewed scrutiny of how the state carries out death sentences. On May 21, Tony Carruthers had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at Riverbend, but the doctor could not establish the required backup line, and the Tennessee Department of Corrections said that once the procedure failed, “the execution was then called off.” Lee later granted Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.
That was the point of friction Hines’ lawyers and dozens of medical professionals had been pressing before Thursday: the same doctor involved in the failed May execution was expected to participate again, even after the earlier procedure broke down at the stage when the backup line could not be placed. Dennis Jenkins, the son of Catherine Jean Jenkins, had no patience for that argument. He said, “For those of you who may be concerned as to whether or not this animal suffered, let me tell you what he did to my mother 41 years ago,” and added that he hoped Hines suffered severe pain. For Jenkins, the end of the case was not about procedure or professional judgment. It was about the death of his mother, and about seeing the sentence carried out 41 years later.
Hines is dead now, and the legal fight around him is over. What remains is the wider question Tennessee has not answered: whether the failed May execution changed enough in practice to satisfy the people asked to defend the next one.
