The Vein They Could Not Find: Tennessee's Botched Execution and the Limits of Democratic Law

On May 21, a medical team in Tennessee spent more than an hour attempting to establish a backup IV line on death row inmate Tony Carruthers. They could not find a vein. Governor Bill Lee suspended the execution for one year and, when reporters asked him about it in Knoxville in July, said the protocol itself remained sound.[^1] "The Department of Corrections did exactly what they were supposed to," Lee told reporters. "The protocol itself still stands, as it should." His justification was precise: capital punishment is "the law of Tennessee that the people have decided."[^1] The democratic origin of the law, in Lee's framing, settles its legitimacy.

Eight Republican state senators who wrote to Lee after the botched attempt, while still expressing support for capital punishment, called the incident a failure "to carry a lawful sentence of its own courts" and urged an independent review.[^1] Lee declined.

What democratic origin does and does not confer

The Thomistic tradition, followed by Gabriel Zanotti in his commentary on Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles, holds that human laws divide into just and unjust, and only the just ones bind conscience through the force of the eternal law from which they derive.[^2] A law's democratic pedigree, however genuine, does not by itself supply the moral authority the law claims. Aquinas's framework does not deny that an unjust statute is still a law in the formal, juridical sense; it denies that formal status alone closes the moral question. Popular will and moral licitness are related but distinct, and the distinction matters most precisely when the act authorized is irreversible.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, revised under Pope Francis in 2018, applies this distinction directly to capital punishment. Paragraph 2267 declares execution "inadmissible" because it attacks the inviolability and dignity of the person, a judgment framed explicitly as one that holds regardless of the procedural correctness of the sentence.[^3] The inadmissibility finding does not turn on whether Tennessee followed its own protocol. It turns on what the act does to the person who undergoes it.

The person the state cannot reduce to an instrument

Catholic social teaching has long distinguished the human person from the mere individual, a distinction Zanotti traces through the Maritainian line of thought in his treatment of the common good.[^4] Jacques Maritain's argument in The Person and the Common Good is that democratic society is ordered toward the flourishing of persons, and this ordering limits what democratic majorities may instruct the state to do. The common good is itself a personalist concept: it is achieved, as John XXIII stated in Pacem in Terris and Vatican II confirmed in Gaudium et Spes, precisely when the rights and duties of the human person are secured. A state action that treats the person as a terminal instrument of social order, even one with a popular mandate behind it, is in that tradition a contradiction of the common good it claims to serve.

This is the structural gap in Lee's appeal to democratic legitimacy. "The people have decided" is constitutionally accurate; Tennessee has enacted capital punishment through lawful democratic processes. What the Thomistic and personalist framework denies is that the people's decision, however procedurally valid, reaches into the domain of what may be done to a person's body and life. John Paul II makes the same point in Evangelium Vitae: certain acts fall outside the competence of majorities to authorize, because they violate a dignity that precedes and grounds the social contract itself.[^5]

Moral unease within the pro-capital-punishment position

Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network, which works with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on opposition to the death penalty, called the botched execution "a barbaric act that disregards the sanctity of life" and said "the only way to avoid perpetuating more violence and harm is to step back from executing people altogether."[^1]

The senators' letter is worth reading alongside Murphy's statement. The senators did not oppose capital punishment; they argued the state had failed to carry out its own lawful sentence competently. Their concern was procedural. Murphy's was categorical. Both, from opposite positions, registered that something had gone wrong on May 21 that a protocol review could not fully address. The medical failure did not create the moral problem; it made it visible.

The Catholic Christian understanding of the person illuminates why the two reactions converge on unease despite their political distance. In the framework developed by Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, the first natural inclination of the human person is toward life: preserving one's own existence and caring for the body and soul as a unity.[^6] The state's act of execution contradicts this inclination at the most fundamental level. A protocol that makes the contradiction technically cleaner does not change what the act is.

What "the people have decided" cannot settle

Lee's phrase is not wrong as a constitutional description. Tennesseans have, through their elected legislature, authorized capital punishment. The tradition Lee invokes, as a governor who has spoken publicly of his Catholic faith, has always distinguished between what a people may legally enact and what they may morally commission the state to do in their name. The 2018 revision to Catechism paragraph 2267 is the Church's clearest modern statement of where that line falls on execution. Democratic legitimacy brought the protocol into existence. It cannot answer the question the protocol raises.

References

[^1]: Tyler Arnold, "Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee Says No Changes to Capital Punishment After Botched Execution," National Catholic Register (EWTN News/CNA), July 9, 2026; Sam Stockard, "Tennessee GOP Senators Seek Review of Botched Execution," Tennessee Lookout, June 29, 2026.

[^2]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles (n.d.): "Las leyes dadas por el hombre o son justas, o son injustas. En el primer caso tienen poder de obligar en conciencia en virtud de la ley eterna."

[^3]: Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267, as revised August 1, 2018; cited in Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, Dignitas Infinita (2024).

[^4]: Gabriel Zanotti, Economía de Mercado y Doctrina Social de la Iglesia (n.d.): "el bien común al que la autoridad sirve en el Estado se realiza plenamente sólo cuando todos los ciudadanos están seguros de sus derechos."

[^5]: John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae (1995).

[^6]: Craig Steven Titus, Paul C. Vitz, William J. Nordling, Matthew McWhorter, and C. Gross, "Fulfilled in Virtue," in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 249–305.

META DESCRIPTION: Tennessee's governor defends capital punishment as democratically enacted law. Catholic teaching draws a harder line between legal legitimacy and moral authority.