MIDDLE TENNESSEE (WGNS News) - Between 1916 and August 13, 2026, 143 inmates were executed in Tennessee, according to Tennessee Department of Correction records.
Thursday Execution - On Thursday, August 13, 2026, 66-year-old Anthony Darrell Hines (Pictured Above) was executed by lethal injection for the 1985 stabbing death of 54-year-old Catherine Jean Jenkins in Kingston Springs, Tennessee. Jenkins was killed while working as a housekeeper at a Kingston Springs motel. Hines was pronounced dead at 10:43 a.m. CDT, with his final words: “Tell my son hello.” Hines had unsuccessfully sought intervention from the courts and Gov. Bill Lee, with his attorneys raising concerns about potential difficulties establishing an IV similar to problems that halted Tony Carruthers’ attempted execution three months earlier. Tennessee Department of Correction records list Hines’ case as a murder conviction from Cheatham County and his execution as the state’s most recent.
Rutherford County Related Executions - Two previous Tennessee executions involved murder convictions from Rutherford County. John H. Wallace was executed on May 25, 1927, for murder in Rutherford County, while Albert Duboise was executed on April 11, 1947, for a Rutherford County murder conviction. A third execution with significant Rutherford County ties occurred in 2007, when Daryl Keith Holton of Bedford County was put to death by electrocution.
Holton was executed after being convicted of murdering his four children in 1997. Before the killings, the children and their mother had lived in Murfreesboro after leaving a battered women’s shelter. Holton eventually learned where they were living and began visiting the children regularly, later receiving weekend visitation. After his former wife obtained an order of protection in 1997, Holton acknowledged that he continued driving by her Murfreesboro apartment before she and the children moved to another address.
On November 30, 1997, Holton picked up the children at a Walmart in Murfreesboro, with arrangements calling for him to return them later that evening to the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department. Instead, he took them to his uncle’s automobile repair garage in Shelbyville, where he fatally shot 12-year-old Stephen, 10-year-old Brent, 6-year-old Eric and 4-year-old Kayla with an SKS semi-automatic rifle. Prosecutors sought the death penalty based on the mass murder of four people and, in three of the counts, the fact that the victims were younger than 12 while Holton was an adult. The jury imposed four death sentences.
Holton was executed by electrocution on September 12, 2007, nearly 10 years after the murders. His execution was significant for another reason: it marked Tennessee’s first execution by electrocution since 1960. Tennessee Department of Correction records list Holton’s underlying murder convictions in Bedford County.
Tennessee has used capital punishment intermittently since becoming a state in 1796. Hanging was used during the state’s early history before Tennessee transitioned to electrocution, and 125 people were executed by electrocution between 1916 and 1960. Lethal injection later became the primary method of execution, although offenders whose crimes were committed before January 1, 1999, may request electrocution. The state’s current death-row roster contains 41 offenders, all sentenced for first-degree murder or the older “Murder 1” designation. Christa Pike is the only woman currently serving a death sentence in Tennessee. Some inmates are serving multiple death sentences, including Jessie Dotson with six and Nathaniel Pipkin with five. Tennessee resumed executions in 2025 following a multi-year pause, executing Oscar Franklin Smith, Byron Lewis Black and Harold Wayne Nichols that year, followed by Anthony Darrell Hines on August 13, 2026.
