Government secrecy had as much to do with the botched execution of Byron Black as the toxic chemical Tennessee used to slowly and painfully take his life, death penalty abolitionist Stacy Rector said.
Stacy Rector
“The state has a law shielding the government from having to tell the truth about its death penalty program, and people wonder why these executions keep getting messed up,” said Rector, executive director of Tennesseans Against the Death Penalty. “When you allow the state to take a person’s life with this kind of secrecy, you are setting yourself up for what we are seeing.”
What witnesses reported seeing during Black’s Aug. 5 execution in Nashville included repeated and bloody attempts to place IVs in his arms followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, groaning and shouts of pain.
“‘It’s hurting so bad,’” Black, who was 65, complained shortly after 10:30 a.m., The Tennessean reported. “His spiritual adviser replied, ‘I’m so sorry.’” He died more than 10 minutes later.
But Black’s case was just as tragic in the years before the state pumped pentobarbital into his veins at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Rector said.
Black was convicted and sentenced to die in 1989 for the shooting deaths of his girlfriend and her 6- and 9-year-old daughters. In multiple examinations since arriving on Death Row, it was determined he suffered from severe intellectual disabilities and, more recently, with a serious psychological disorder.
Donna DeStefano
“Mr. Black is now elderly and has dementia and brain damage,” disabilities expert Donna DeStefano said during a July livestream urging Gov. Bill Lee to commute Black’s death sentence to life in prison. “He has never lived independently, and even after marrying and fathering a child he could not perform simple tasks like cooking or operating a washing machine.”
Black’s legal team sought a competency hearing to prove his intellectual disabilities exempted him from capital punishment under a 2021 state law prohibiting the execution of intellectually disabled people. But the Tennessee Supreme Court denied the motion because Black had a similar hearing years before the law went into effect.
“If he was convicted today, he would not be eligible for execution,” Rector said. “It is heart-breaking to think he died because of a legal hiccup.”
Attorneys also raised concerns that Black’s implanted cardioverter-defibrillator could cause complications during lethal injection. But neither the Tennessee high court nor U.S. Supreme Court responded to appeals for the device to be disconnected.
Bill Lee
“We will have to wait for the autopsy to know if that played a role (in Black’s suffering),” Rector said. “What we know is he couldn’t get his breath and he was in a lot of pain.”
She added it is “mindboggling” Gov. Lee did not grant clemency and that the state went ahead with the procedure given Black’s disabilities and the negative reputation of the state’s lethal injection drugs.
“Pentobarbital is known to be corrosive to the body — to the veins and lungs. It’s considered a sedative, but it doesn’t always anesthetize the person. It can cause a sensation of drowning and burning at the same time, and that sounds like what happened to Byron,” she said.
A group of Tennessee Death Row inmates filed a lawsuit in Davidson County Chancery Court in March to challenge the state’s use of phenobarbital in executions, the Nashville Banner reported. But the court doesn’t have the authority to halt executions until the January 2026 hearing on the constitutionality of the protocol.
Byron Black
Yet growing evidence shows the drug leads to excruciating pain, said Amy Harwell, the attorney representing inmates in the suit. “Tennessee appears to have picked this method only because they were able to get their hands on pentobarbital, not because its use for executions complies with the Constitution or state law.”
Which gets back to issue of secrecy in how Tennessee and other states obtain and certify drugs used in lethal injection, Rector said. “Drug companies don’t want their drugs being used for this, so states have passed laws shielding themselves from having to be honest about the quality of the drugs and where the drugs come from.”
She said it is ironic in Tennessee’s case because Lee halted executions for three years to ensure issues with the state’s lethal injection protocols were addressed.
The death penalty resumed with the execution of Oscar Smith, 75, in May, a month after it was postponed because prosecutors admitted the pentobarbital had not been tested for bacterial toxins, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Harold Nichols, 64, is scheduled to die Dec. 11 and has requested the electric chair as his method of execution, The Tennessean reported.
Donald Middlebrooks was scheduled for execution Sept. 24 but that was delayed by a federal judge pending the January hearing on the state’s execution protocol.
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