Byron Black’s lawyers, convicted of three murders, had argued that their execution could be more painful due to the defibrillator that had implanted in the heart, which could sharpen their suffering. But the ethical doubts that his case raised have not arrested the authorities of the State of Tennessee, who have executed him on Tuesday through a lethal injection.
The execution has been carried out at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institute, in Nashville, after the US Supreme Court and the state governor, Republican Bill Lee, rejected the latest clemency requests. Black, 69, had killed in 1988 his girlfriend and the two daughters of this, nine and six years. He was sentenced to death a year later and since then, more than 35 years ago, he has remained in the death corridor.
The type of heart implant, which functions as pacemaker and defibrillator, was going to continue working during execution, which, together with the allegations of the defense on the intellectual disability of the inmate, added an ethical dilemma to the case. Some medical experts warned that the device could cause repeated downloads while the lethal drug cocktail was injected, something that their lawyers were based to request clemency.
“They are opposite objectives. Executing a man who has implanted technology that tries to keep him alive,” he explained to the newspaper The New York Times The Bioethics Arthur Caplan, of the University of New York School of Medicine.
The defense asked to remove the defibrillator to avoid the suffering of man, who was in a wheelchair and suffered dementia, according to the Death Criminal Information Center organization. The request for grace stressed that this execution was going to be “the first of a person with disabilities in Tennessee in recent times.” “His brain and body continue to deteriorate at a rapid speed. [Black] It is not absolutely a threat to anyone. The fact that this Court has closed the doors to a justified request based on its intellectual disability is not only unconstitutional, it is inhuman, ”said his lawyer in the middle The Intercept.
The Supreme of the United States, of conservative majority, declined on Monday to intervene on the edge In the case, having rejected four different requests. The same did the governor of Tennessee: “The courts have universally determined that it is legal to apply the execution judgment issued by the jury” that declared him guilty, he said in a statement. “We will continue fighting to seek justice for the Clay family [la mujer y las niñas asesinadas] And make Black give accounts for his horrible crimes, ”said Jonathan Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney, in a statement issued after the last ruling of the Supreme Court of the State last month. It was based on the testimony of an expert called by the State that“ refuted the suggestion that Black would suffer severe pain if he were executed ”.
Black’s is the 28th execution so far this year, which exceeds the total figure of 2024 (26 executions) and, according to Death Penalcy Information Center, an NGO that compiles data throughout the country. The volume of executions of this year owes much to the activity of the gallows in Florida, the Republican State that concentrates almost one in three executions, and which two more is planned in August.
Surveys indicate that a meager majority of Americans (53%), but that are mostly opposed in the case of condemned with intellectual disabilities or mental illness. Black is the first prisoner with intellectual disability executed since the seventies, when the death penalty was again legal in Tennessee.
Its execution was first scheduled by 2022, but it was delayed when an investigation was opened on why the State did not properly prove the drug cocktail of the lethal injection. Black was one of the inmates who sued Tennessee for his new injection procedure, which entered into force this year. In March, a firing squad executed a condemned for double murder in South Carolina ,. It was the first death due to shooting in the last 15 years in the US.
