One by one, the media witnesses approached the microphone to describe what they saw at the execution of Byron Black. Speaking at a podium outside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, each said a version of the same thing: Black, 69, had suffered before he died.
The lethal injection had been scheduled for 10 a.m. The curtain to the death chamber opened a half hour later, revealing Black strapped down tight to the gurney and covered with a white sheet. Minutes after the massive dose of pentobarbital started to flow, “he began breathing loudly and sighing,” said a reporter from the local NPR station WPLN. Black raised his head and looked around, then said, “It’s hurting so bad.”
“I’m so sorry,” his spiritual adviser replied.
Another reporter said she saw Black lift his head multiple times. “I can’t do this,” he said. After that, he “audibly gasped.”
Of the seven media witnesses, several had also attended Tennessee’s last execution, carried out in May. This one was different. “It was unanimous among all of us that we saw him in distress,” said Steve Cavendish, editor-in-chief of the Nashville Banner. “We heard him in distress.”
Lawyers for Black had repeatedly warned about the risks of executing their client, a man whose physical and mental health had significantly deteriorated over the years. In addition to a diagnosed intellectual disability, Black had dementia, brain damage, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. For much of July, Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry had fought to require the state to deactivate Black’s implanted defibrillator/pacemaker. A judge held a hearing in Davidson County Chancery Court and ultimately ruled in Black’s favor, concluding after two days of expert testimony that the lawyers had proved their case: There was a risk that the device would attempt to restart Black’s heart during his execution, sending painful shocks through his body. “This risk can be completely avoided by deactivating [the device],” the judge wrote.
But the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office appealed to the state Supreme Court, which invalidated the ruling. As the execution approached, a Nashville hospital put out a statement saying that it had never agreed to deactivate the device and emphasizing that its staff “has no role in State executions.” On the eve of the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, and Gov. Bill Lee rejected a plea for clemency.
Ultimately, Black’s death appeared to have fulfilled the very fears of his attorneys and advocates.
Black spent 36 years on death row for the murder of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two young daughters, Latoya and Lakeisha. The family was found shot to death in their South Nashville home in 1988. Although Black maintained he was innocent, investigators quickly seized on him. Clay’s relatives said he had been angry at Clay after she told him she planned to reconcile with her ex.
Questions of Black’s competence had been raised since before his 1989 trial and both the U.S. Supreme Court and Tennessee Supreme Court would eventually rule that people with intellectual disabilities were exempted from execution. But Black’s legal challenges were blocked at every turn. In 2022, the same office that sent Black to death row acknowledged that he was intellectually disabled and, under a new state law, filed a motion with a Nashville judge saying that he should be resentenced to life. But the judge rejected the motion, finding that because Black had been previously given a chance to prove his intellectual disability in court, he was not entitled to do so again.
Henry, who represented Black for 25 years, was emotional as she approached the mic. She filled in gaps in the reporters’ accounts, describing the moment Black was removed from his death watch cell at 10 a.m. Although her view was obstructed, “we could hear the cuffs being placed on his arms and legs,” she said. “And then we saw him being led from the cell.” Guards had to hold him up from both arms since Black could not walk unassisted. Then “they lifted him onto the gurney.”
At 10:15, the IV team entered. They found a vein on his right side relatively quickly, although “there was a lot of blood,” she said. But on the left side, they struggled, eventually bringing out medical equipment to assist in the process.
In an email after the execution, Ohio surgeon Jonathan Groner, a critic of lethal injection and author of a forthcoming book “The Hippocratic Paradox: How the Healing Profession Kept the Death Penalty Alive Over the Past Two Centuries,” said he suspected the execution “was possibly botched.” Watching the press conference, he found numerous red flags. “Pentobarbital should cause rapid unconsciousness,” he said. “It sounds like this did not occur.”
At the podium, Henry did not mince words. “My client was tortured today,” she said. The pentobarbital itself is painful, she said, and autopsies have shown that people executed using the drug consistently show evidence of pulmonary edema, in which lungs become filled with fluid, causing a sensation akin to drowning. Whether the pentobarbital had not worked as intended or the implanted heart device repeatedly shocked Black as predicted was not clear. The lawyers would know more after an autopsy and after extracting data from the heart device. “But this is a classic case of a person who was put through extreme pain through a process of lethal injection. And it’s what we’ve been saying in court for years,” said Henry. She read a statement from the podium, decrying the execution as an act of “unbridled bloodlust and cowardice.”
“Today, the State of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in violation of the laws of our country simply because they could,” Henry said. “No one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them. And if you think that what happened is just about one man, you are wrong. We are witnessing the erosion of the rule of law and every principle of human decency on which this country was founded. Today, it is Byron. Tomorrow, it will be someone you care about.”
Black’s execution was the ninth carried out in Tennessee since the state resumed executions in 2018. On previous occasions, demonstrators had gathered in a field on prison grounds while the executions were carried out. But following a pause in executions, the state had toughened its security protocols. On Tuesday morning, additional checkpoints were in place; a K-9 handler circled vehicles with his German shepherd, and people were patted down before being allowed into the fenced-in area. Phones were now forbidden. Even credentialed reporters had been barred from bringing pens into the area.
Activists had demonstrated against the planned executions over the previous days. On Sunday, a group marched from Riverbend to the state Capitol, joined by one of Black’s sisters as well as his adult son, Samson Childs. The next morning, Childs visited the governor’s office alongside local death row advocates and activists with the abolitionist group Death Penalty Action. They delivered petitions along with a letter to Lee inviting him to pray with the men on death row, an invitation they have extended before every execution. They have yet to receive a response.
Introduced as Black’s son, Childs shook hands with an aide to the governor. “We’re hoping and praying for a callused heart to be uncalloused,” Childs told him. The aide said he would deliver the message. Lee denied clemency later that day.
At the vigil during the execution, participants stood in a circle and prayed for everyone connected to the case and to the execution. “We pray for Angela Clay and her daughters Latoya and Lakeisha Clay, who died violent deaths,” they said. After the execution, members of Clay’s family stood under the media tent, where two large photographs of Clay and her daughters had been set up behind the podium. A victims liaison from the Tennessee Department of Correction delivered statements on their behalf.
“I am thankful and grateful to see this day, Clay’s sister Linette Bell said. Black’s family “is going through the same thing now that we went through 37 years ago. I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology. He never apologized and he never admitted it.”
Shortly after noon, Carolyn Weaver, who had participated in the Sunday march from Riverbend to the Capitol, got a text message from her loved one Gary Sutton, one of Black’s most devoted neighbors and caretakers on death row. “Well I just seen the van go out with Byron’s body,” he wrote. Before the execution that morning, a prison staffer had delivered a message from Black. “He said to tell me that he loved me because I was his brother,” Sutton wrote to Weaver. “He said to tell you that he seen you on TV walking for him.”
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