An Tennessee Death Row inmate is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday morning despite his lawyers’ concerns that his heart device could surprise him repeatedly and expose him to unconstitutional suffering.
Byron Black is ready to be executed at 10 am at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville after the United States Supreme Court and the governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, declined on Monday to intervene.
Black’s lawyers had asked the Supreme Court to stop the procedure based on an affirmation that it is mentally incompetent and, therefore, should not be executed because it would violate their constitutional rights. In addition, the lawyers asked the Superior Court to review whether to proceed with their execution without first deactivating their implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, would challenge the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment of the eighth amendment.
The Supreme Court denied requests on Monday.
Kelley Henry, one of Black’s lawyers, asked Lee to intervene to avoid “risk a grotesque show executing Byron Black.”
The governor said he would not show clemency.
“The courts have universally determined that it is legal to carry out the jury’s execution judgment given to Mr. Black for the atrocious murders of Angela Clay and her daughters Lakeisha, 6, and Latoya, 9 years old,” Lee said in a statement. “Consequently, I don’t plan to intervene.”
Last month, the Davidson County Foreign Ministry Court failed in favor of Black, 69, so that his device was deactivated before his execution after his lawyers argued that the ICD, which is designed to deliver electrical discharges to those with beats of dangerously fast beats, could try to restore their heart at a regular pace as the pentobarbital of drug drugs.
Black could be “subject to severe pain and suffering of having their heart repeatedly again to the rhythm during their execution,” they said in a judicial presentation.
But the Supreme Court of Tennessee revoked the ruling on Thursday, discovering that the Foreign Ministry Court did not have the authority to issue a decision that would effectively stop an execution. Even so, state judges said, there was nothing to prevent the State and lawyers from solving a plan to deactivate the DAI.
However, state attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti promised a statement last week to advance with the execution. He also played that black is intellectually disabled or would suffer severe pain if he were executed.
“Our office will continue to fight to seek justice for the Clay family,” said Skrmetti, “and to hold blacks responsible for their horrible crimes.”
Black was sentenced in the 1988 fatal shooting of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, 29, and the daughters Latoya and Lakeisha. At the time of murders, Black had been in work release as part of his jail sentence for shooting the separated husband from Clay, Bennie Clay, about 15 months before.
Angela Clay’s sister told Nashville police that Black had threatened to damage her sister because she was considering finishing her relationship and meeting with her husband.
Bennie Clay told the Tennessean newspaper last week that she has forgiven Black and intends to witness the execution of the man who killed her family.
“God has a plan for everything,” Clay said. “I had a plan when I took my girls. I needed them more than I, I guess.”
In the middle of decades of appeals, Black faced three execution dates, but the procedures were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, a pause in Tennessee executions due to problems in the test of their lethal injected medications.
Tennessee resumed executions in May under a new lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital, a sedative.
In testimony last month at the Davidson County Foreign Ministry Court, medical experts for the State and Black argued if their ICD, which was installed last year, would cause prolonged pain.
“Mr. Black will not feel the clashes, since he will be in a coma” caused by the lethal injection process, Dr. Litha Lambrakos, cardiac electrophysiologist at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Miami Miller testified.
But Dr. Gail Van Norman, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington who specializes in cardiac surgery, suggested otherwise. She testified that using a powerful amount of pentobarbital, which can cause death due to respiratory failure, could unnecessarily trigger the Black defibrillator.
“ICD sometimes deliver clashes when they are not necessary,” he said. “This is devastating for patients.”
The possible deactivation of Black’s defibrillator had raised larger questions about whether a medical professional who would be willing to help the Tennessee correction department could be found.
The main medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Board of Anesthesiology, have adopted ethical codes that generally promote the health and well -being of patients and do not explicitly condemn their members who participate in executions.
Black’s defenders say that his case, given their unique position around their defibrillator, as well as their documented mental impediments, guarantees the clemency granted of the governor.
Black’s lawyers say he uses a wheelchair and suffers from several ailments in addition to congestive heart failure, including dementia, kidney disease and prostate cancer.
“His body is failing and his mind is deteriorating,” Henry wrote to Lee in a clemency application last month. “Its execution would not serve justice: it would mark an irreversible act of cruelty against a deeply physical physical and mental disability man who does not represent a threat to anyone and would leave his whole family, who appreciated him, devastated.”
