Red blood cells (RBCs) don't have nuclei in mammals, so they are usually considered to be pretty inert compared to other cells.
They do have some biochemical activity, and evidently there is some mechanism for cell death in RBCs when they are induced to degrade or infected by pathogens. I found this reference that shows caspases -8 and -3 are evident in mature RBCs. Several other components of the cell death pathway are not evident.
At this time the authors speculate that they don't activate to induce cell death.
It seems that over the broad field of disease research 'apoptosis' and 'cell death' are used equivalently even when the well known apoptosis pathway is not involved.
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