WASHINGTON (CN) - A Tennessee man fighting to prove his innocence in a triple murder asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to block his quickly approaching execution. 

Tony Carruthers was sentenced to death 30 years ago after being forced to represent himself at trial and without any physical evidence tying him to the crime. His lawyers say untested DNA and fingerprint evidence could exonerate him, but without the justices' intervention, he'll be executed Thursday morning. 

"The Supreme Court now stands as the final safeguard between Tennessee and this irreversible injustice," Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, said. "The court must stand firmly on the side of truth, fairness, and the basic principle that we should not take a life while serious questions of innocence remain unanswered and while readily available forensic testing could answer those very questions."

Carruthers, now 59, and an accomplice were found guilty of kidnapping, torturing and burying alive Delois Anderson, her son Marcellos Anderson and a friend, Frederick Tucker, in 1994.

During his 1996 trial, a judge found that Carruthers had impliedly waived his right to appointed counsel. Carruthers' attorneys said his pro se defense was so catastrophic and prejudicial that his co-defendant's convictions and death sentences were reversed. 

One prejudicial action included Carruthers calling Alfredo Shaw to testify. Shaw had claimed Carruthers confessed to him. But unbeknownst to Carruthers and the jury, Shaw was a paid informant for Tennessee. In a television interview before the trial began, Shaw admitted the police pressured and paid him to testify falsely. 

After he was convicted, Carruthers appealed and sought DNA testing of a blanket found with the victims' bodies. An expert witness for Carruthers' co-defendant, James Montgomery, determined the DNA on the blanket didn't belong to either man. 

Tennessee offered Montgomery a plea deal based on the DNA testing, and he was subsequently released in 2015. 

Under state law, mandatory post-conviction DNA testing must be conducted if a reasonable probability exists that the defendant would not have been prosecuted or convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained during their trial. 

But Carruthers' lawyers said his requests for DNA testing have been denied by Tennessee courts based on arbitrary and irrational constructions of federal and state rules. And they compared his case to Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man who was released from prison last week after the Supreme Court ordered a new trial in light of prosecutorial misconduct in his three-decade-old conviction. 

"Unfortunately, our system gets it wrong sometimes," Carruthers' lawyers wrote, noting that both Carruthers and Glossip have maintained their innocence throughout their convictions and sentences. 

"Mr. Carruthers does not ask to be declared innocent. Nor does he ask to be released from prison," his lawyers wrote. "All he asks is for this court to stay his execution so that this court can review his meritorious claims, in which he seeks fair access to Tennessee's statutory procedures for testing available DNA evidence. The testing that he seeks will take only two weeks to complete." 

Carruthers' case has garnered attention across the country, with over 130,000 people signing a petition to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee demanding the execution be stopped. However, Lee has refused to do so. 

Source: Courthouse News Service