Tony Von Carruthers v. Jonathan Skrmetti

── Tony Von Carruthers v. Jonathan Skrmetti ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Date: May 20, 2026 Category: General NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 26a0220n.06 Case No. 26-5433 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED May 20, 2026 ) KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk TONY VON CARRUTHERS, ) Plaintiff-Appellant, ) ) ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED v. ) STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR ) THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF JONATHAN THOMAS SKRMETTI, ) TENNESSEE Attorney General, Tennessee et al., ) Defendants-Appellees. ) OPINION ) ) Before: READLER, MURPHY, and MATHIS, Circuit Judges. PER CURIAM. Tony Carruthers is a Tennessee capital prisoner whose execution is scheduled to proceed on Thursday, May 21, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. He brought an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 seeking injunctive and declaratory relief, arguing that Tennessee’s Post-Conviction Fingerprint Analysis Act of 2021 (“Fingerprint Act”) and Post-Conviction DNA Analysis Act of 2001 (“DNA Act”) are unconstitutional. The district court denied preliminary injunctive relief to Carruthers. Carruthers appeals the district court’s decision and moves to stay his execution. For the reasons below, we affirm and we deny Carruthers’s motion to stay execution. I. In 1996, a jury convicted Carruthers of three counts of first-degree murder and imposed a death sentence for each count. Carruthers v. Mays, 889 F.3d 273, 276 (6th Cir. 2018). We previously summarized the circumstances that led to the charges and convictions as follows: No. 26-5433, Carruthers v. Skrmetti In February of 1994, Carruthers and an accomplice, James Montgomery, assaulted two men and a woman, robbed them, then buried the three alive. The victims’ bodies were found buried in a cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee about a week after they had disappeared. The jury found that the aggravating circumstances surrounding Carruthers’s crimes outweighed the mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt. Id. at 276–77 (citation modified). Carruthers represented himself at trial. II. While the appellees raise a number of jurisdictional objections, including questions regarding the Rooker-Feldman doctrine and Article III standing, we can affirm the denial of a preliminary injunction and deny the stay on the merits. See Arizona v. Biden, 40 F.4th 375, 390 (6th Cir. 2022) (considering whether the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim when their standing was in doubt). We turn first to Carruthers’s due-process claims. The Fourteenth Amendment protects against the deprivation of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. The procedural-due-process component of this Amendment requires “the government to provide fair procedure before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property.” Lifestyle Communities., Ltd. v. City of Worthington, 165 F.4th 1013, 1026 (6th Cir. 2026) (citation modified). So to prevail on a procedural-due-process claim, a plaintiff must show (1) “deprivation by state action of a protected interest in life, li