Republican leaders in Tennessee’s legislature say they will investigate the reliability of lethal injection as an execution method after the state failed to execute two death row inmates in the span of five months.
Gov. Bill Lee stopped the May execution of Tony Carruthers after a physician unsuccessfully attempted to insert intravenous lines to begin the lethal injection process for over an hour. Death row inmate Christa Pike survived two failed rounds of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol on Sept. 30 before the execution was halted. Pike, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, is receiving medical care in a Nashville hospital.
Lee ordered a third-party review and issued a pause on all executions in the state until the end of the year.
Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, a Franklin Republican and candidate for Senate Speaker, told conservative radio show SuperTalk 99.7 WTN Monday that he supports Lee’s decision to defer executions while the investigation takes place.
“I’m inclined … that if we’re having this much trouble with this particular means of execution, we need to take it off the table and go to something that’s far more reliable and predictable,” Johnson said, listing the electric chair or a firing squad among other potential options.
Gubernatorial candidate and U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn said she favors reinstating the electric chair as the state’s primary execution method.
“My colleagues in the General Assembly, if we come to the conclusion that the lethal injection as a means of execution is not reliable enough, and we need to take that off the table, I would like for us to be able to contemplate that before another person is set to be executed,” Johnson said.
Lethal injection has been Tennessee’s primary execution method since 2000. Offenders who were sentenced to death prior to Jan. 1, 1999 can request electrocution as an alternative. Lee paused executions in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and again in 2022 after officials failed to test lethal injection chemicals for endotoxins, a chemical contaminant, before the execution of Oscar Smith, prompting Lee to pause the execution and order an investigation and protocol review.
In 2023, Rep. Dennis Powers, a Jacksboro Republican, introduced a measure that would allow death row inmates to choose to be executed by firing squad as well as by lethal injection or electric chair. The bill failed.
Johnson said he is awaiting legal advice regarding the state’s options for contemplating other means of execution.
House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Crossville Republican, told SuperTalk 99.7 WTN that he is in favor of “looking at all alternatives,” including the electric chair, firing squad or hanging, which Tennessee used as its method of execution until 1913.
State Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat, and state Rep. John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat and the party’s House caucus chair, called for the legislature to bring back legislative oversight of state agencies.
Johnson and Sexton said Tennessee’s Republican supermajority has no intention of moving away from capital punishment.
Sexton said lawmakers would do their own investigation into the failed executions. He also said the general assembly will “look at speeding up” the appeals process for death row offenders.
“The problem is in the 1970s and 80s, we had the U.S. Supreme Court that put in a lot of parameters and a lot of things that I don’t think are needed, and allowing them to file appeal after appeal and drive up the costs and try to force states not to execute,” Sexton said. “That’s not what we’re going to do.”
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes nationwide in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, finding such statutes imposed in an “arbitrary and capricious” way violated the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Four years later, the court upheld a new set of more specific capital punishment statutes with narrowed eligibility in Gregg v. Georgia.
Johnson said Slemmer’s family waited 30 years for Pike’s sentence to be carried out, and the state failed them.
“I certainly think there should be an appeals process,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t really need to take 30 years.”
Both Johnson and Sexton indicated they expect legal challenges to any changes made to the state’s execution protocol.
“We are going to work with the (Attorney General), with the White House, with others to figure out how to do this effective, efficiently and swiftly,” Sexton said. “And if we need (it) to be challenged in the court system, then let’s go challenge it. Let’s see what the new U.S. Supreme Court says and then we’ll go from there.”
–newsfromthestates.com
