Death row inmate Paul Dennis Reid may have a while longer to live as the courts determine his mental competence.
Reid is scheduled to be executed Wednesday for the 1997 murder of two Clarksville fast-food workers. He was also convicted of killing five other people at two Nashville restaurants around the same time. Since 2003, Reid’s attorneys have sought appeal of the death penalty in his case without their client’s permission, saying he is not competent enough to participate in his defense.
Today the state supreme court sent Reid’s appeals back to the court of criminal appeals with a detailed set of instructions for how to determine competence.
Attorney David Raybin is an expert on the state’s death penalty. He anticipates that the supreme’s court order will result in respite for Reid of up to a year. More importantly, he says it establishes for the first time a standard of mental competency for post-conviction proceedings. And he says that will mean there is one less delay available to death row inmates.
“A lot of these things are just one delay after another. And if you’re gonna have a death penalty, however you stand on the issue, I think most people would agree if you’re gonna have one it needs to be administered in a fair, just and uniform manner, but it also has be done with some degree of speed, it can’t just take forever or else there’s just no point in having it. One of the last questions left to be answered in these death penalty cases now has been resolved. This will have the effect of speeding things up in some of these other cases.”
The last time a person was executed in Tennessee was in 2000. Robert Glen Coe died by lethal injection for killing 8-year old Cary Ann Medlin. His was the first execution in the state after a 40-year hiatus.
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